ISAIAH THE ECONOMIST

Russian icon of Isaiah the prophet, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has a certain friend who regularly reads this blog and who breaks out in hives anytime the topic veers toward the Bible or religion. I think this may be due to early exposure to Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. You know who you are...

Here's hoping the person in question can momentarily endure because I'm about to make a non-sectarian biblical allusion.

One of the coolest passages in the Hebrew Bible is the 40th chapter of Isaiah, which deals with the return of exiles from captivity in Babylon. In the middle of all that is a short and sweet critique of idolatry:

The workman melts a graven image and the goldsmith covers it with gold and casts silver chains. He who is poor chooses a tree that won't rot and seeks out a skilled workman to make a graven image that shall not be moved.

The speaker here thinks it is absurd for people who can think, see, hear, and feel to make something that can't and then worship it. We do that all the time with the economy, which we often speak of as if it was a conscious being ruling over us.

I suggest that the way we think about things is important since it can affect how we respond to them. If we think of a given situation as intractable, we're not likely to do anything to change it.

But here's the deal: people make the economy and people can change it and are doing so every day and have done so ever since early humans began to barter and produce. The Greek word from which economy is derived means something like the rules of our household. The Greeks also distinguished between things that exist as a part of nature (phusis) and things that people create (nomos). That's the "onomy" in economy.

In other words, the economy is a good, not a god.

WATER AND WEATHER AND FOOD, OH MY! It's scarier than lions and tigers and bears.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN? Several scientists weigh in here.

SPEAKING OF SCIENCE, could you use a little more in your life?

MORE PIE IN THE SKY for the late great Utah Phillips is here.

CHARM SCHOOL DROPOUT DEPARTMENT. Vice President Dick Cheney dissed El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia recently. Many of our elected officials were not amused. The best response came from Congressman Nick Rahall, who said "We may owe the vice president a debt of gratitude for yet another great West Virginia slogan: 'Dick Cheney is not from here.'"

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SHAME

Funakoshi's shrine in Kamakura, courtesy of wikipedia.

The venerable Okinawan karate master Gichin Funakoshi left behind the essence of his teaching in his master text, Karate-Do Kyohan. The book concludes with a chapter titled "Maxims for the Trainee," which consist of proverbs, ethical advice and sayings from ancient sources.

One line in it puzzled me for years:

A gentleman should be gentle and never be menacing; close, yet never forward; slay, but never humiliate...

I got the gentle and close part, but it took a while to digest the part about slaying but not humiliating. Obviously, he wasn't advocating slaying since he constantly preached non-aggression and respect for life, even though he taught that one should be prepared for any emergency. The saying was meant to convey not the thinkability of slaying but the unthinkability of humiliating someone.

This wasn't just idle talk--it was almost a taboo. A traditional karate dojo drums respect and courtesy into a student from the first minute they step on the floor. (The student had better bow before doing that, by the way.) Respect is even--or maybe especially--to be extended to one's opponents. And people are expected to act that way in and out of the dojo. Funakoshi's mantra was "karate begins and ends with courtesy."

It was only after I made a study of the nature of violence that I came to fully understand his wisdom. As Dr. James Gilligan argued in his 1996 book Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, shaming, disrespect, degradation, and humiliation are precisely the pathogens that transmit violence:

I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo the "loss of face"--no matter how sever the punishment, even if it includes death...

The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence whether toward others or toward the self. Shame is a necessary but not sufficient cause of violence, just as the tubercle bacillus is necessary but not sufficient for the development of tuberculosis. Several preconditions have to be met before shame can lead to the full pathogenesis of violent behaviour. The pathogenic, or violence-inducing, effects of shame can be stimulated, inhibited, or redirected, both by the presence or absence of other feelings, such as guilt or innocence, and by the specific social and psychological circumstances in which shame is experienced.

The different forms of violence, whether toward individuals or entire populations, are motivated (caused) by the feeling of shame. The purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride, thus preventing the individual from being overwhelmed by the feeling of shame...

I'm presenting his conclusions rather than the case he makes to support them, so check out the book for that. I will say that he worked for decades with violent offenders in prisons and mental hospitals and has also studied the effects of structural violence such as inequality.

In my experience in trying to prevent or reduce violence, I've often noticed how the smallest incident which someone perceives as shaming can set off all kinds of consequences that can spin totally out of control and harm innocent people.

(All the carnage of the Iliad, the reader may recall, happened because someone degraded someone else by taking away his prize...)

Study and experience have convinced me of Funakoshi's wisdom. Sometimes struggles happen and when they're on, they're on. But they are more easily prevented and have more chance of eventual resolution if one refrains from humiliating one's opponents. It's a powerful preventive measure in containing the toxin that contributes to violence.

HUNGRY COUNTRY. Rising food prices are cutting the value of food stamps even as more Americans turn to them. This one is from the Washington Post.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FOOD PANTRY, costs are climbing along with demand.

MORE CHEERY NEWS about what the Iraq war has done to global energy costs can be found here.

One more thought...our industrialized and globalized food system is based on cheap oil, both for transportation and for fertilizers.

YOU MAY NEED A WEATHERMAN. A new stuudy of climate change predicts major disruptions in water, agriculture, and forestry.

SAIL ON... El Cabrero is sad to report the death of labor folksinger and Wobbly Utah Phillips, who died in his sleep on May 23. He "taught" me several classic IWW songs, which I still occasionally plunk out on guitar when the mood strikes. Here's hoping he really does get pie in the sky.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED