Some Thoughts on Capitalism & Freedom

Came across a thought-provoking post by Hugh Howey titled, "A Fan of Freedom," in which the author defends some basic tenets of capitalism against those who, in light of the extraordinary incomes received by those in the banking industry in recent weeks, are questioning its value.

Hugh states the problem (emphases his):

All capitalism means is that the people own their own stuff. We can possess our own land, we can start our own business, we can determine the price of goods we create, and we can enter into binding contracts with one another. That’s it. This is a system that creates economic freedoms of potential (if not outcome). How can people be against freedom? Because they don’t like the choices other people make and would really like to have complete control over someone else.

This makes sense. A lot of people are just plain envious of the wealth others have accumulated and prefer to bring them down to their level rather than do the work required to achieve similar levels of financial success. What capitalism allows is the opportunity for someone to drop out of college, build a business (or work in one), and become a billionaire. This is a good thing. What a country!

Hugh on money:

A side-note on what money is, for those that seem to hate or distrust it. Money is a token used to represent work. It’s the stand-in, the go-between, for a cobbler and a butcher. One man trades shoes for another’s sausage. Even when they don’t need each other’s wares at the exact same time. Hating money is like hating trade between two free peoples, or hating the idea that a person’s work has any intrinsic value. I usually find that people who hate money are misplacing their hatred of greed (or expressing their own envy and materialism).

Exactly. If people have a problem with others earning and accumulating money, they're really commenting on their own unwillingness (or laziness) to do the hard work of building their own fortune. That's the system we live in. If you or Michael Moore don't like it, move some place else.

Otherwise, here's what you're left with. Hugh again:

The current thinking on economic freedom seems to be this: Human liberty occasionally results in abuses of human liberty. Free people often use that freedom to trample the freedom of another free person. In order to make sure the latter has freedom from the former, we need to remove ALL human freedom. That is, in order to make sure nobody murders anyone ever again, we need to all be locked up in our individual cages. This is what’s best for mankind.

Freedom to build wealth means that someone will abuse the system through illegal means. They should be punished, obviously. But don't punish the system that allows all of us the ability (the freedom) to create wealth by legitimate means.

KABUL24 - The Documentary Film

KABUL24 - A documentary film directed by Ben Pearson and narrated by Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) about the captivity of 8 Western aid workers and their 16 Muslim co-workers by the Taliban in 2001.

In the summer of 2001 the Taliban strategically captured 24 Shelter Now International Aid hostages that captured the attention of the world for more than three months. The Taliban took hostage 2 Americans, 2 Australians, 4 Germans, and 16 Muslim co-workers from Afghanistan, and held them as an insurance policy against the impending retaliatory actions of September 11th.

Based on the true story as told by the captives, KABUL24 recounts their frightening 105-day captivity and the cruel treatment of their Muslim co-workers who were accused by the Taliban of converting to Christianity. Revisit their journey from the grueling interrogation to their sham “trial” before the Taliban Supreme Court, to the dangers endured during the bombing of Kabul and a crushing sense that the world had abandoned them. What transpired through this trial is a journey of inspirational faith, grace and endurance.

This film is being shown this weekend at the Tallgrass Film Festival in Wichita, KS.

Marriage Is Not A Right

Subtitled: You Can't Legislate Morality!

Got off topic a few weeks ago in an American Lit class. We were discussing slave narratives in conjunction with early feminist writers like Margaret Fuller. The general point had to do with disenfranchisement - the denial of civil rights.

"This is what gays are going through today," one person said. "They're being denied their rights to marry." A general chorus of amens followed.

I raised my hand.

"I don't think gay marriage is analogous to disenfranchisement," I said. "No law is keeping consenting adults from cohabitating." I probably should have left it at that, but I went on to say, "Marriage isn't even a right." I guess that's how we got off topic.

So for the next 20 minutes we all shared our ignorance. The discussion ranged from efforts at defining marriage to personal testimonies of alleged discrimination against some third cousin's step-son's half-brother who couldn't visit his lover in the hospital.

I raised my hand.

First, no law is denying two consenting competent adults from entering into any legally binding or privilege providing contract. The power of attorney addresses health and hospital issues. Co-signing loans and property titles is done all the time. And one's will covers transfer of property after one's death. So what rights are gays being denied?

Second, marriage is a civic institution (albeit one ineluctably molded by religious values) that has inherent limits. It is between two people, for one. (Polygamy, at least the last time I checked, is still illegal, denying the "rights" of its advocates.) It is serial - at least for those who decide to have multiple marriages. (This, too, denies the "rights" of someone who wants to have multiple concurrent spouses - say in different states.) In other words, marriage is not an unrestrained right - it is an already legally defined and self-limiting concept.

So in an attempt to get back on topic, I concluded, "This is why I believe that the issue of gay marriage is not comparable to disenfranchisement of blacks and women in the 1800s."

Someone responded, "But you can't legislate morality."

To me this was a non-sequitur. But that got me thinking. Hmm - I thought - that's exactly what those in favor of gay marriage are trying to do. They are trying to legislate, and thus institute, a particular set of moral values upon/within the broader American culture. Isn't this what all acts of legislation attempt to do? The question is really, whose set of moral values best promote the welfare of society? (And this post is way too short to address that issue!)

Finally, one woman told an emotional story of how a person she knew of was forcibly removed from his home after his partner died because his name wasn't on the lease, etc. The story was a bit convoluted but there seemed to have been some legitimate legal issues that were violated. At the very minimum, human decency was denied this person.

I felt sad for that guy who lost his home. What happened to him was probably not right. Something should be done to change that, and prevent something like that from ever happening again.

But then, I guess you can't legislate morality.

Cultural Relativism Isn't

Interesting discussion in class the other day. My prof mentioned that Gene Roddenberry's Prime Directive was an example of cultural ethnocentrism!

Here's why. Despite the widespread touchy-feely sentiment regarding Star Trek's promotion of multiculturalism, the nefarious premise behind the Prime Directive is that there is a developmental timeline that applies to all cultures. Given enough time - and without interference from their 'superiors' - primitive societies will advance to one day become like us. Smile. Nod. Father knows best.

This is ethnocentrism - measuring other groups in relationship to one's own group. And this is a no-no for cultural relativists, who believe, among other things, that one should not judge a culture by one's own set of standards. One should simply try to understand a culture's values, beliefs, and activities within its own context.

Therefore, cultural relativism is the superior way of viewing all cultures!

Which, of course, is internally contradictory. Judgments are made regardless of who is doing the observing because all observations are inherently subjective - they come from certain perspectives. The real question is what set of standards are most appropriate to judge that culture, for we all have standards by which we judge.

For example, those who say we should not call a culture primitive are invoking a standard that assumes that their belief is more advanced (or civilized or enlightened or etc) than those who hold more traditional views of cultural differentiation. Those who claim that cultural relativism is the axiomatic anthropological principle by which to study other cultures are simply intellectual ethnocentrists.

Now some cultural relativists hold to ethical relativism as well. That is, having no absolute standard by which we should judge, we are disqualified from criticizing any (including our own) society's beliefs or practices. This is ludicrous on the face of it. While this is an extreme position (well, maybe not, I am in a university setting now and they believe some crazy stuff on campuses), it merely proves that those who hold to this view are in fact making judgments based on their own absolute standard.

So it turns out that cultural relativism really isn't.

Keep the F-word Vulgar

I'm starting a "Save the F-Word" Campaign.

And I'm asking each of you to do your part. Please, keep the f-word vulgar - as in indecent, obscene, lewd. Or at least let it remain something crude, coarse, and unrefined.

How? By not allowing another connotation of vulgarity to dominate its defining characteristic. That is, don't let it become current, popular, common...or even worse, banal. That's right, I'm asking you to refrain from using the f-word in order to save it.

Why? Because the effin f-word is used so effin often as an effin descriptor that it's effin lost its effin significance. Is that effin clear enough for you!? Plus, that kind of writing is boring.

And yes, I'm specifically appealing to writers here, but potty mouths can zip it as well. Either way, f-word saturation has reached critical levels and threatens to undermine its essential value.

Oh yes, the f-word is valuable. It's shocking. It's subversive. It's controversial. Or it used to be. Sadly, it's starting to lose its punch. Witness Catcher in the Rye. It used to be banned from our school libraries, now high schoolers find the book...dull.

Mark my words, that's what will happen to you and your stories. Sure, right now it's trendy. The f-bomb is everywhere! Vive la liberté! People think it cool, hip, expressive to pepper their blogs, creative writing assignments, literary journals, and popular novels with the f-word. It's realist, modern, and postmodern (all three at once!) standing in solidarity against out-of-date conservative puritanical prudish authoritarian values.

I get it. So you have to spread your wings. Fine.

But if after reading this you're still committed to the liberal use of the word, better fly now because that window is closing. One day - soon! - it will simply be a mark of sloppy writing, like, you know, omg, slang gone wild. Then you'll have squandered a perfectly good obscenity. We may even be too late. "F**k you" doesn't even start a bar fight anymore.

Still, there is hope. There is yet time to pull back from the brink. I implore you to save the f-word for those rare and special occasions when its appearance in the text is surprising, effective, and actually says something important. You'll know when to use it. Treat it like painite in your bag of vocabulary gems.

In the mean time, what are some alternatives? Well, of course, frack/frak is a scifi favorite and can be used quite creatively. Friggin' works. Effin, too. Fudge has lost its flavor, imo. But fiddle might be worth bringing back. The point is, give these a try and save the f-word - and vulgarities in general - for really important literary jobs.

Please, before it's too late. Join me in my campaign to keep the f-word vulgar.

Edgar Allan Poe, Detective Fiction, & the Romantic Tradition

And Now For Something Completely Different
A Short Examination of Poe’s Groundbreaking Detective Fiction Within the Context of Romantic Literature

With the creation of Inspector Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe not only debuts the first literary crime investigator but introduces a whole new genre into American literature, detective fiction (Norton 1599). While many consider Poe to be the father of the crime story – and so, in plot and character development, parts ways with his contemporaries – he nevertheless is writing within the Romantic tradition. The three stories that feature C. Auguste Dupin (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rôget,” and “The Purloined Letter”), while ground-breaking in regards to genre, contain elements of romanticism that we will briefly examine here. Limiting our discussion to the theme of reform, we will inspect two aspects that reveal Poe’s romantic influences and one that seems to break with the movement and foreshadow a more realistic (perhaps darker?) tradition of literature.

Many writers of this period concerned themselves with issues of societal reform. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, for example, wrote about equality and individual advancement. Both were suspicious, however, of institutional expressions of reformation. They believed in the self’s inherent ability to attain enlightenment and thereby transform society. These two aspects of reform – distrust of governing authority and faith in the individual – are echoed in Poe’s detective fiction. In “The Purloined Letter,” for example, the hero of the story is Dupin who stands outside the law and in fact gently mocks his “old acquaintance, Monsieur G—, the Prefect of the Parisian police” (1599) for being unable to solve the crime, that is, the theft of a certain piece of correspond-ence. When Dupin succeeds, he (and so Poe) reveals the inadequacy of the institution and celebrates the power of the self.

What becomes a standard element of crime stories (the rivalry between traditional law enforcement and the maverick detective) finds its roots in Romanticism’s distrust of traditional authority. So, too, the detective’s keen powers of investigation are lifted up. Dupin is a master of deduction, observation, and the human psyche. Considering that the Prefect failed to discover the letter purloined by Minister D—, Dupin boasts, “the more satisfied I became that, to conceal this letter, the Minister … [did not] conceal it at all” (1609). Dupin then goes on to explain his superior reasoning and daring exploits which lead, of course, to the recovery of the stolen item. He quite enjoys the drama of it all as illustrated by his presentation of the document and acceptance of the monetary reward from the Prefect: “[Y]ou may as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will hand you the letter” (1604).

So Dupin appears to be a quintessential romantic hero, standing in sharp relief against an inadequate establishment. Yet the motivation for his daring exploits – that of revenge (1611) – seems to portend a transition from romantic (especially transcendental) literature where the soul is ennobled and, according to Emerson, is “part and particle of God” (1112), to a more realistic or naturalistic style of writing in which the human condition, in all its faults and foibles, is simply observed with very little commentary. Although Poe is supremely interested in the interiority of the mind, he does not judge as right or wrong, or true or false, its motivations and perceptions.

As a Romantic writer, Poe rejects the rationalism (and faith in the institution) of the enlightenment, but does not quite embrace the emotional optimism of his contemporaries toward personal reform. He both stands within and is stepping beyond the literary movement of his day; and with the creation of detective fiction (as well as other genres) may be introducing to the literary world something completely different.

Work Cited:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B, 1820 – 1856, Seventh Edition. Ed. Robert S. Levine, Arnold Krupat. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.

Note: This short essay earned an A in my American Writers class, but I can not be held responsible if you plagiarize and get a B.