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Distributing the Treasure

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In the parable of the fields, Jesus says of his kingdom that:

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Then in the parable of the talents, Jesus addresses the Apostles and says of the servant that hid the money he had been given to invest:

‘You wicked, lazy slave…take away the talent from him’…For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away

The two parables illuminate the challenge of bringing divine power into the world. The unsuspecting finder of faith has no idea what to do with it. Looking at the history of the Hebrews, it is obvious how fragile faith is. From Aaron to the Pharisees, from Saul to Herod: the leaders of the nation of Israel corrupted faith for political and economic purposes. Aaron acted in good faith because the people were afraid when Moses disappeared on the mountain, but in the time of Jesus the Pharisees twisted the fear of divine retribution to line their pockets. Saul, having been anointed king by Samuel, was angered when others threatened his authority. In Herod’s time, that pattern had become so entrenched that oppression of dissent was not even remarkable. Given this, perhaps it would have been best to keep the treasure hidden.

But the Apostles were students of a master who prepared them to exercise faith in service to the oppressed. They had seen what faith could do. All that they required to see it multiply was simple courage. For those demonstrating courage, the master would not judge between those with greater or lesser skill in the exercise of power, but reward them all. For those lacking courage, the portion of power that was given them would be given to others.

The tension between the two parables should be heeded by us today as we ponder how to go about distributing the riches that Christ has provided us to do good in the world. As people of compassion, our natural tendency is to respond to fear and righteous anger with promises of aid. The obvious first step is to eliminate the cause of the fear and/or anger. When that cause is hunger, it would be hard to fault an offer of food. But when the cause is political tyranny, forceful intervention (as currently in Russia) can be propagandized to justify further oppression. The Russian people have offered adulation in response to Putin’s aggressive militarism.

So we have to ask, when offering aid, “What are you going to do with the power we offer you?” When the hungry man is fed, will he then seek employment? If an oppressed people is offered political assistance, how will they organize to overcome the tyrant? If these question can’t be answered, then their troubles are merely symptomatic of a large social disease that must be addressed before individual problems can be solved. They may need education, or political enfranchisement – or assistance in finding a leader that can articulate their needs.

I think that many of the world’s problems today require the last: for those offering Christian compassion to go beyond simple charity to supporting the development of leaders motivated by Christian ethics. In assessing candidates, I favor strongly the wisdom of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. In developing leaders, the program upholds this law:

A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

These qualities are an interlocking web of virtue that ensure that power is not diverted for personal gain, but rather directed towards those that first inspired our compassion. They are not qualities that necessarily translate to the easy currency of popularity. That is gained all too often through promises of an end to fear and oppression that cannot be made good until the people themselves begin to manifest the qualities of true leadership. As it is said in the Chinese I Ching:

Of the great leader, when the work is done the people say ‘We did this ourselves.’

God took 2000 years to work his will on the people of Israel. For those continuing that work in the world today, patience (although perhaps on a more human scale) is essential. As in Jesus’s relationship with the Apostles: It is not upon us to do the work ourselves, but only to offer the oppressed the hope that it can be done at all. Hope is the seed of courage, Christian compassion is the seed of faith. When courage and faith combine, anything is possible.

Containment

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In the ‘90s, following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the liberalization of China’s economy, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History. From the reviews, I gathered that his proposition was that the competition between centrally planned societies and free-market societies had been decided decisively in favor of the free market. With that settled, Fukuyama argued, all that was left was the working out of the practical details in specific situations. The world would be mercifully free of the paroxysms born of ideological conflict.

The realists pointed out that, in fact, the Cold War era had been relatively free of conflict. With the loss of the dichotomy that pitted Russia and China against the rest of the world, history would in fact resume its messy march. The problem of foreign policy in new millennium would be to prevent generalized conflict on a global scale. We are seeing that borne out in current events.

At root, I believe that the prescience of the realists reflected the falseness of Fukuyama’s dichotomy. The true dichotomy is between societies that commit a significant part of their resources to the protection of human rights, versus those that allow the powerful to exploit human capital. In the extreme, exploitation is visible today in the slavery of child farm laborers in Mexico, and in sex trafficking on a global scale. But it is also seen in the rather more subtle exploitation of educated workers in the developed world, bound by lop-sided employment contracts and forced by income inequity to work and commute long hours that inhibit their investment in the maturation of their children.

With these miserable expectations, I was heartened in the ‘90s by the democratic transition in the Philippines. The methods deployed by the US were a fascinating contradiction. Over the decades, the Philippine armed forces had been reorganized around the use of advanced US weapons systems that require ongoing maintenance. At the strategic level, true mastery of these systems required training in US military academies. That training came with indoctrination in the democratic theory of military service. Thus, when the dictator called upon the military to prevent the installation of a freely elected government, General Ramos would only patrol the streets to maintain order. The Marcos regime had no option but to quit the country.

It has been with some trepidation that I have watched this and other methods deployed by first-world nations over the years to contain the spread of exploitative practices around the globe. The foremost tool has been the creation of plutocracies funded by the sale of natural resources. We see this at play in Russia. Secretary Kerry warned that the invasion of Ukraine would be an “expensive” adventure for Russia. President Putin scoffed that the US could not project power into his back yard, but now can only watch oil prices plummet as the US and other nations opened the taps at their oil fields. It may take some time, but the West must hope that eventually the zeal of the Russian people will wear down under growing poverty.

We see something similar happening in China, which has concentrated wealth in the hands of the very few not only by exploiting human capital, but by failing to contain wide-spread environmental degradation. The problem for China is that its lack of respect for human rights is not limited to the public at large. It extends into the oligarchy as well. Fearing that their wealth will be seized by political opportunists (including, by many accounts, the police), Chinese entrepreneurs are taking their money and talent overseas.

The counter-examples to this pressure are Iran and North Korea, both nations with rigidly controlled ideologies that beat down the will of the people. More disturbing to me is Tibet. The Dalai Lama has indicated that he would rather see the fall of his religious tradition than to have China choose his successor. The Tibetan natives are being overwhelmed by Han resettlement. It appears that the nation is going to succumb to rapacious greed.

The recent debacle over Sony’s The Interview has reinforced my gloom. The United Nations is now building a case against North Korea for widespread human rights violations against its citizens. The details include prison camps containing up to 120,000 people, summary executions and rape. Obviously this is not a situation that occurred overnight. Why has the world been silent? What precedents are we following in this case, and what lessons may be drawn by tyrannical leaders elsewhere?

In formal political theory, the only hope is in the tendency of dynasties to collapse. In the early stages, this is often a matter of cannibalism among the elite. As in China, they seize wealth from each other. When the unprofitability of that course is established, the next stage is in the realization that their ambitions are bounded by the incompetence of the people they depend upon. This results from a number of factors, perhaps foremost being the paranoia of thieves that leads them to surround themselves with people that they can control. When the cost of incompetence is grasped, a competition begins for access to creative talent, which over the long run leads to devolution of power to the middle class.

The lie to this hope is found in feudal Europe, where the middle class was allowed to accumulate wealth only until it created holdings that could threaten the ruling class. Then taxation and royal writs of monopoly were used to restore control to the nobility. Capitalism took hold in Europe only because the War of the Roses diverted the attentions of the nobility during the early stages of the industrial revolution in England.

In the face of these apparently implacable social and political pressures, I trust in faith. Not blind faith, but belief fused with scientific understanding. There are sources of power that beggar the military might of nations because they turn the will of warriors; there are methods of communication that no media barriers can block; there are mechanisms of justice that make the rapacious accumulation of wealth an exercise in self-destruction. Tyrants can frighten and exploit their people, but they can’t repeal the laws of physics.

The Unitarian Universalist minister Mark Morrison-Reed wrote, in Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, that the negro slaves of the American South, having lost all control of their physical existence, turned inwards and discovered an abiding presence of love. Grasping the power it offered, they developed strength to control the will of their masters.

Predators beat a single drum: they use fear and greed to seize wealth, rather than creating wealth through disciplined creativity. It is there, in the fundamental psychological weakness of the predator, that the faithful will find the chink in the armor, and subdue their oppressors.

The Conservative Agenda

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Today, I got a teeny glimpse of what it’s like to be a blog star. I responded to an MSN editorial that supported the Republican agenda on the grounds that lower property taxes and denial of global warming would encourage us to have more babies, which would prevent our economy from being overtaken by higher-growth cultures. I surveyed the realities of living in high-growth nations, and offered that maybe if the ultra-rich had kept the manufacturing jobs on-shore, the middle class would still be able to buy houses. Furthermore, California’s experience with property tax cuts has been that it’s made it really difficult to educate the kids we have now to the competitive standards in the 21st century. I had three-digits in likes by lunch-time.

The Republican Party likes to position itself as a bastion of “conservative” values and practices. You know, prudent fiscal management, results-driven policies, and stable families. But, looking at the record, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that it is actually driven entirely by the financial industry, which loves budget and trade deficits because federal bond issues and currency trading brings them a tidy guaranteed income. That, at least, appears to be the principal difference, since the Reagan era, between Republican and Democratic administrations. Republicans: tax cuts, deficits and off-shoring. Democrats: budgets brought into balance, and a focus on workforce and ecological sustainability.

Now some will complain that I’m just declaring my biases, and I am a registered Democrat. But I’d really like to see conservatism reclaimed as a political philosophy. I did encounter a coherent definition in Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.

For much of human history, institutions were not only hard to create, they were almost impossible to sustain. That’s because running them requires time away from basic survival, and when that is threatened, people think first of themselves. That results in disbanding of the institution, and often looting of its assets.

In this context, conservatism is aptly named: it creates value by preserving institutions. Those most suited to that defense often take a prejudicial view of the public they are meant to serve. They assume that the public should be denied power until it can explain how it will organize institutions to provide sustainable solutions to social ills.

Unfortunately, as suggested in my survey of Republican policies, that is a rationale that all too often simply caters to greed. To the ‘80s mantra “greed is good”, I always riposted with a gibe at the neo-conservatives’ “Tinkle-down Theory” of economic growth.

The antidote to conservatism is liberalism. A liberal recognizes that power can get trapped in institutions that prevent its spread to those that need it to solve problems. They advocate methods, such as taxation or regulation, to reallocate power to those that are motivated to create a better society. The disease of liberalism is the slippery slide from reform into destructive revolution.

The psychosis in modern American politics was born in the New Deal government set up by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. All of a sudden, the liberal Democrats had control of extremely powerful institutions that were designed to preserve the welfare of the common man.

Across the aisle, the Republican party of business was committed to dismantling those institutions. This created a kind of schizophrenia for them. They were to defend the institutions that existed prior to the New Deal, and try to destroy those that came with it. The mantra that finally produced policy leverage in the ‘80s was the ideal of corporate innovation. Unfortunately, corporations aren’t designed to innovate: for the most part, they suffer from the same organizational lethargy as government. Rather, corporations disseminate solutions created by others.

With these glaring breaks between theory and reality, conservative philosophy was open to corruption by those with a simple will to power: people with a strong motivation to get what they want, no matter the cost to others.

And so we have the kind of analysis that I responded to this morning: raw manipulation of the public’s hopes and fears, with nonsensical segues into policy prescriptions.

I work in control systems, and this kind of output is known as “open-loop.” It occurs when the feedback provided by the affected elements of the system (in this case, the public) has no meaning to the controller (the ultra-rich that are buying our political system). The moneyed class no longer has any vested interest in the public well-being. In fact, public misery produces larger and larger deficits that correlate directly with their financial success. It’s like a heater running with the thermostat temperature sensor wired backwards: the hotter it gets, the lower the temperature reported by the thermostat, and the more fuel pushed into the heater. Things are just going to get worse, until the heater explodes.

What’s the solution? Well, I think that it’s to put all of this conservative/liberal division aside. George Santayana wrote a wonderful little book called Three Philosophical Poets, analyzing the work of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. Santayana say them as representing life lived according to reason, faith and will (respectively). His closing hope was that someday a poet would come along to merge the three. I don’t know if that is possible, but I would hope that our political leaders would try to find some balance between them.

The Philosphical State

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I studied my moral and ethical philosophy with Albert Tussman at U.C. Berkeley. He taught there well into his 70s, I believe, and resolved to give it up when a coed popped her bubble gum before his lecture. I guess that her action crystalized his sense that nothing was sacred to the generation he was teaching.

His wisdom to me was granted one Spring day when he broke out of his office hour to take me out on the lawn under the clock tower. He allowed me to unburden myself of my concerns for the future. When I finally realized what a great honor he had granted me, I asked what he considered to be the most important source of philosophical understanding in our age. His response is relevant to this discussion: the decisions of the Supreme Court. He supported the judgment with the observations that they decided matters that had to be implemented by systems that were critical to the survival of the citizens of the nation, but that they had absolutely no power to effect change. Thus their decisions had to be crafted in a way to build consensus between the parties in the matter.

“Philo sophia“, indeed.

So what about academic philosophy? Well, these are people involved in far more abstract issues regarding the accessibility of truth and the nature of human experience. These become esoteric for at least two reasons.

The first is the categorization problem. As in the sciences, we start with coarse categories of experience and then, when that coarseness frustrates our powers of explanation, we refine. That means a never-ending progression of inventive vocabulary that ultimately leaves the common man standing out in the hallway (metaphorically). What becomes even more interesting is when thinkers in two traditions of philosophy try to reconcile their categorization schemes. Ach! Me noggin!

The second is the desire to maintain lineage so as to preserve as much from the past as possible. Now the Supreme Court is going through an activist stage in which this principle is less important, but in general philosophers are wary of throwing anything away. This means that they tend not to reclaim words used in the past, but rather to invent new ones.

My clearly stated intention at everdeepening.org was to buck this latter trend. I set out to reclaim words in common usage to try and help people out of the moral and ethical morass that imprecision of everyday use has bequeathed to us. First and foremost of those words was “love.”

Imprecision in everyday use is mostly a problem when power is conditioned upon avoidance of responsibility. When the shit hits the fan, a typical sound bite is “Well, that’s not what I understand the word to mean”, or “But that’s not what I meant.”

I was put onto this by the confusion regarding the phrase “I love you”, which I realized meant, in most usage, “I love myself.” In other words: “I feel good when I’m around you – let me  use this token to bind you to me.”

While the power of precision has been valuable to me in managing my personal relationships, it’s been essential to me in surviving my spiritual engagements. When we know what it means to love others, we know what it means to love ourself. That understanding has protected me from a lot of harmful associations that presented themselves with a great deal of shiny glitter.

Executive Privilege, Restrained

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One of the challenges in ruling ancient Rome was that, as a Ponzi scheme run for the benefit of the senatorial elite, the government was often unable to meet its obligations to its veterans. This could lead to some unruliness. One of my favorite images is that of Octavian strapping on his armor to confront an angry mob demanding compensation for their service. He was rescued by Marc Antony and the Praetorian Guard, but I have to admire the courage Octavian demonstrated in choosing to come face-to-face with the people affected by his mismanagement.

At the other end of the scale we have the touching image offered in Revelation 4. Unconditional Love sits on a throne in heaven, surrounded by angels that channel the gratitude offered by all the living creatures on earth. The isolation of love is tragic. Remedying it seems a likely goal of Jesus’s promise to “remake heaven and earth.”

Somewhere between these two extremes of executive authority we have the modern CEO and head of state, in whom are gathered all of the defects of power, remoteness and corruptibility.

America’s constitutional system was designed to limit the power of the head of state. One of the principle abuses of royal authority in Europe was the use of charters to transfer control of markets to the nobility. This inhibited the rise of institutions with the wealth to defend the common man in disputes with the nobility. To guard against that in the new federation of US states, three branches of government were established with distinct powers.

George Washington, the first president, observed that his principle function was to encourage development of the nation’s resources. He was a booster for private business. The Native Americans bore the worst of this link between development and government. In one particularly egregious instance: The Cherokee of Georgia had actually begun to assimilate when gold was discovered on their land. Greedy speculators supported passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1838, and the Federal Government forced the Cherokee from their lands.

The cozy relationship between business and government became abusive in the late 1800’s. Deflationary policies ensured that the purchasing power of idle capital continued to increase, with the side-effect that farmers could not pay their obligations and were thus forced off of their land. Attacking these hypocritical policies was made more difficult because the Federal government lacked the financial means of the interstate corporations. Unchecked, the robber barons of the period, with their company stores and abusive working conditions, lined their own pockets at the worker’s expense.

Breaking up this social disaster was largely the work of the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin. Theodore was an army officer, and associated with men who were forced into the army by the loss of their lands. He was the president that stood up against the banking system and supported unionization against the violent resistance of owners. Franklin, who as governor of New York had witnessed the worst of the industrial hygiene crisis that beset the nation, betrayed his own class to ensure that a federal safety net was secured for vulnerable workers when the Great Depression paralyzed industry.

Roosevelt’s “New Deal” posed a challenge to our constitutional system with the creation of federal agencies administered by the executive branch. Congress no longer had the means to check executive power when so much money was allocated to agencies under the President’s control, and the courts were required to wait for whistleblowers to step forward with a complaint before they could intervene.

While you would think that it would be the liberal parties that would step forward to check this imbalance, in our day it is actually the conservatives leading the charge. This is because they share the agenda of business leaders seeking to limit the influence of the government on their operations. This is particularly strong with oil industry executives that want to prevent regulation of CO2 emissions. The power of business in the party was evidenced in 2012, when the flood of tea party money from out of state cost the Republican Majority Leader his seat in the House of Representatives. His crime: negotiating with Democrats on budget and immigration issues.

What bemuses me is that there’s another way to solve the problem besides trying to shut the government down. The mechanism of modern corporate structure are designed to ensure that majority shareholders don’t abuse the rights of minority shareholders. Corporate policy is set by an elected board, with implementation by a professional staff serving at the pleasure of the board. The public record-keeping required of the board ensures that abused shareholders have the opportunity to seek redress.

To ensure that the President did not abuse his powers, the constitution could be amended to make the president’s cabinet the chair of departmental boards, with the remaining members selected by 2/3 vote of Congress. Implementation would be through career civil servants. The president would retain his unilateral authority as command-in-chief. While limiting the opportunity for misdoing by the executive, this program would also reduce the political value of Congressional witch-hunts, as Congress could no longer say “we didn’t know.” They could invest the recovered with the business of the legislature – which is to debate and pass bills.

As for the corporations: they’ve come quite close to restoring the halcyon era of the late 1800’s. The injustice, as in the era of the Roosevelts, is that they acquire their wealth under the auspices of the government. Government, after all, is simply a system for negotiating the rules that control the distribution of power throughout the society. That can include procedures that seem somewhat abusive. For example, when a board awards a huge stock option to an executive, a legal transfer of wealth takes place from the shareholder to the executive – without the direct consent of the shareholder. The government enforces the legitimacy of that transfer. It’s seems reasonable that the people should have the option to recover that ill-gotten wealth through progressive taxation.