Sunday, March 10, 2024

The Zone of Interest

It is, unfortunately, all too easy for the human brain to relegate the humanity of other human beings—to dehumanize them. This is the leitmotif of The Zone of Interest (2023), a film whose release took place in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza in which civilians, including women and children, were targeted as if they were culpable for the break-up of the U.S.S.R. and the Hamas attack in Israel. Under the fallacy of collective justice, dehumanizing carnage can run wild. In The Zone of Interest, the banality of evil is evident even though it is subtle under the protection of the status quo. To be sure, other films depict such banality of the ordinary; what distinguishes The Zone of Interest is how it shows us the rawness of human violence ironically by now showing it.


The full essay is at "The Zone of Interest."

  

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Yale Divinity School

On February 21-23, 2024, Rowan Williams, a former archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a series of lectures on the topic of solidarity in moral theology. In my own research, I relate that field to ethics and historical economic thought. Williams’ theory of solidarity goes beyond what he calls “the vague feeling of empathy” that is emphasized in the moral writings of David Hume and Adam Smith. Williams has solidarity, unlike mere "fellow-feeling," reach a person’s identity and even one’s soul through a shared experience of existential fragility. Solidary pertains to interpersonal relations and is thus relevant to neighbor-love, which includes being willing to attend to the human needs even of one’s detractors and enemies, as well as just plain rude people. I contend that the upper echelon at Yale Divinity School is at two-degrees of separation from this sort of solidarity, especially as it is wholistic rather than partisan in nature. It is no accident, by the way, that the self-love that characterizes the school's culture has manifested in some courses being almost entirely oriented to advocating very narrow ideological partisan positions, politically, economically, and on social issues at the expense of sheer fairness to students, wholeness, theology, and academic standards. At the time, the school was accepting 50% of studen applicants. I leave these ideological and academic matters to the side here so I can focus on the astonishing distance between the school's dean and the sort of solidarity that he heard of in the lectures and that could lead to Christian leadership for Yale's Christian divinity school, which includes two seminaries.  


The full essay is at "Yale Divinity School." 

Friday, February 23, 2024

On the Role of Agribusiness in Global Warming

Agriculture is a major source of carbon and methane emissions, which in turn are responsible for the general trend of the warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. In fact, agriculture emits more than all of the cars on the roads. 10 percent of the emissions carbon dioxide and methane in the U.S. come from the agricultural sector. Livestock is the biggest source of methane. Cows, for example, emit methane. Methane from a number or sources, including the thawing permafrost, accounted for 30 percent of global warming in 2023. As global population has grown exponentially since the early 1900s, herds of livestock at farms have expanded, at least in the U.S., due to the increasing demand.[1] We are biological animals, and we too must eat. More people means that more food is needed, and the agricultural lobby in the U.S. is not about to let the governments require every resident to become a vegetarian. Indeed, the economic and political power of the large agribusinesses in the U.S. have effectively staved off federal and state regulations regarding emissions. It comes down to population, capitalism, and plutocracy warping democracy.


The full essay is at "On the Role of Agribusiness in Global Warming."

1. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Energy and Global Population

There is a temptation, especially since the global average temperature reached the 1.5C increase threshold in 2023 much faster than anticipated, to focus narrowly on the progress in renewable energy sources without placing it in perspective relative to the total amount of energy being used globally, the annual increases in energy demand, and the root cause, the explosive growth in human population since the early 20th century. The strategic geo-political international interests of countries impacted and should thus be considered as well. 


The full essay is at "Energy and Global Population." 


Sunday, February 18, 2024

On the Impotency of International Law in a System of Sovereign States: The Case of Gaza

The sheer brazenness with which countries ironically recognized as being sovereign states by international law ignore international law even in regard to human rights that seeks to place boundaries on said sovereignty reflects the impotency of international law, and thus even that which recognizes national sovereignty itself. For the rest of us, continuing to believe that upcoming cases before the International Court of Justice, the UN’s court, are of consequence and thus even worth paying attention to, demonstrates abject stupidity, as if we were herd animals without learning curves. Admittedly, the stubborn, self-aggrandizing governments are ethically worse than the world’s population that lets such governments blatantly and even explicitly ignore judicial rulings of the International Court of Justice (and the European Court of Human Rights), but culpability can also be gleamed from the public’s truly pathetic irrational belief that another case against a country that has just ignored a verdict of that very court might just work in curtailing human-rights abuses and outright, even genocide-scale, aggression that outstrips even the sin of retaliation. Either I am blind or the proverbial emperor is not wearing any clothes.


Friday, February 16, 2024

The Humanities on Climate Change

William Paley claimed that the “university exists to form the minds and the moral sensibilities of the next generation of clergymen, magistrates, and legislators.”[1] The assumption at Cambridge in 1785 was that both “individual conduct and a social order pleasing to God can be known and taught.”[2] To know outside of divine revelation what is pleasing to God was typically considered to be presumptuous back then because human finite knowledge cannot claim to encompass all possible knowledge. This could not even be claimed of AI a couple decades into the twenty-first century. Although infinity itself is not necessarily a divine concept—think of infinite space possibly being in the universe—it cannot be said that humans have, or even are capable of having, infinite knowledge. Theists and humanists can agree on this point. So, when a professor decides that a political issue is so important that using a faculty position to advocate for one’s own ideology in the classroom, presumptuousness can be said to reek to high heaven. I assume that any ideology is partial, and thus partisan, rather than wholistic. Both the inherently limited nature of the human brain, and thus human knowledge, and the presumption of an instructor to use the liberal arts, or the humanities more specifically, to advocate for one’s own ideology were strikingly on display on a panel on what the humanities should contribute on climate change. The panel, which consisted mostly of scholars from other universities, took place at Yale University on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, 2024. Perhaps on that day in which the two holidays aliened, both fear of our species going extinct—literally turning to dust—and love of our species and Earth could be felt.  That we can scarcely imagine our planet without our species living on it does not mean that such a scenario could not happen; and yet I contend that the humanities should not sell its soul or be romanticized ideologically to be transacted away into vocational knowledge, as if the humanities would more fittingly ask how to do something rather than why something is so. Going deeper, rather than departing from the intellectual raison d’ĂȘtre in order to tread water at the surface, metastasizing into training and skills, is not only the basis of the humanities’ sustainable competitive advantage in a university, but also the best basis from which the humanities can make a contribution to solving the problem of climate change by getting at its underlying source. Neither a political ideology or skills in “knowledge-use” can get at that; rather, they are oriented to relieving symptoms, which although very harmful, could be more expeditiously redressed by discovering and understanding their root cause. So I’m not claiming that universities should do away with applied science and research on technology, such as to absorb carbon from the seas and atmosphere; rather, I contend that the liberal arts and sciences, especially the humanities, should not be turned into engines of application.   


The full essay is at "Humanities on Climate Change."


1. A. M. C. Waterman, Political Economy and Christian Theology Since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 211. 
2. Ibid.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Yale Vipers

Even though it is sometimes difficult to "read between the lines" to assess whether or not people in an organization are welcoming or tacitly "showing you the door," the message is undoubtable and even palpable when "all the arrows are pointing in the same direction." In the case of Yale, where I have been an alumni scholar temporarily in residence during the 2023-2024 year, the university's administration could do its alumni a big favor by explicitly saying that we are not welcome back on campus, except to visit and of course donate money. Instead, passive aggression, unaccountability, and even unwarranted retaliation rule the roust there, in what is a toxic organizational culture. 


The full essay is at "Yale Vipers."

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

On Universities Cancelling Classes on Some Minor Holidays for Ideological Purposes

Higher education is not valued equally in the various American states. Where academia is not particularly valued, other things can intercede as priorities even at the universities themselves at the expense of academics. In such places, even the universities themselves may value being academic institutions too little by allowing other societal agendas to eclipse the distinctly academic mission. Indeed, even academic administrators may be infected with an ideology currently in fashion societally, and insufficiently academically minded to thwart the interlarded non-academic values that seek hegemony even on academic campuses.


The full essay is at "Universities Cancelling Classes."

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) can be classified superficially as a coming-of-age film, for Hanna, the protagonist, starts out being immaturely contemptuous of her family’s ethnic and religious heritage and current practice. She tries to skip the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. That her aunt Eva had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp makes no difference to Hanna—that is, until she is transported back as her aunt’s cousin (for whom Hanna was named) and experiences the camp herself. Whether she is really transported back in time (and if so, how?) or is merely dreaming is answered in the end but not so blatantly as would insult the viewers’ intelligence. Then again, it’s not every film that has allusions both to theology and The Wizard of Oz. The different ways in which that movie is incorporated and alluded to in this film are actually quite sophisticated in extending the viewers’ sense of synchronicity beyond the film’s narrative.


The full essay is at "The Devil's Arithmetic."

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Record Global Warming and Carbon Emissions in 2023: Exponential Population Growth and Beholden Governments

I submit that not enough attention is brought to bear on the root of the warming of the planet: the huge increase in human population in the 20th century. More attention could also be directed to the disconnect between the warming running up against the 1.5 Celsius limit agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the still increasing amounts of carbon emissions from humans. Finally, the culpability of governments in not being willing to touch economic growth or corporate interests warrants attention. It as if an adult steps on a weight scale and realizes, I’ve never weighed this much in my life, and then eats ice-cream that very night. Unfortunately, the diffusion of responsibility can inhibit governments, industries, and an electorate from having the sort of cognitive dissidence that an individual who has a record weight and then eats ice-cream—not even low-fat!—should have. Such dissidence should trigger changes in conduct. Even so, business and government are comprised ultimately of people and thus have been culpable and are thus blameworthy.


The full essay is at "Record Global Warming." 

Monday, January 8, 2024

Exfoliating a Hero: On Lincoln's Unconstitutional Overreaching

Lest we get carried away and inadvertantly enshrine our leaders with mythic laurals, it is worthwhile to peel back our societal "remembering" of past figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, who have become larger than life.


The full essay is at "Exfoliating a Hero."

On the Birth of Corporate Social Responsibilty in 1869

Referring to the speculation in gold that was engineered by Jay Gould and others in 1869 to enrich themselves and the Erie Railroad, Henry Adams (1838-1918), a grandson of John Quincy Adams and great grandson of John Adams, wrote at the time:

“For the first time since the creation of these enormous corporate bodies, one of them has shown its power for mischief, and has proved itself able to override and trample on law, custom, decency, and every restraint known to society, without scruple, and as yet without check. The belief is common in America that the day is at hand when corporations far greater than the Erie [Railroad] — swaying power such as has never in the world’s history been trusted in the hands of mere private citizens  . . . — will ultimately succeed in directing government itself. Under the American form of society, there is now no authority capable of effective resistance.” (1)




1. Henry Adams, “The New York Gold Conspiracy,” in Charles F. Adams, Jr. and Henry Adams, Chapters of Erie (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), pp. 135-36.

Legislation of the U.S. Government during the Civil War: A Case of Unconstitutional Governance?

Lest history be forgotten, it may come around again to bite us when we least expect it.

During the war between the Confederate States and the United States of America, The Legal Tender Act required debtors to accept “greenbacks,” the U.S. Government’s paper currency. The National Bank Act barred state banks from issuing notes, giving the U.S. Government a monopoly on paper currency. Finally, The Internal Revenue Act imposed a federal income tax and other levies. Henry Brands asks, however, whether “greenbacks” fall under the U.S. Constitution’s wording that the federal government can “coin” money. If money was in coin specie when the constitution was written, the meaning could be widened to include new means without necessarily extending the power of that government beyond what was intended.



Source: Henry W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900 (New York: Doubleday, 2010), p. 13.

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Barbie

In The Wizard of Oz (1939), Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, tells Dorothy at the end of the film that it had been within her power to go home to Auntie Em’s farm in Kansas at any time, simply by clicking the heels of her ruby shoes thrice together. At the end of Barbie (2023), Ruth, who created the Barbie and Ken dolls, tells the traditional Barbie that she can become human herself simply by choosing to feel, and thus to live. The Witch and Ruth occupy similar roles, as do Dorothy and Barbie. But whereas Dorothy is trying to get back to the home she had known and now appreciates from faraway Oz, Barbie is trying to get to what she was made for—something qualitatively different than not being alive. Barbie’s plight is existential, and she discovers that the root of her identity transcends the feminist agenda. As home transcends ideology, what a person is made for transcends even home. Put another way, home is ultimately in being who one really is, hence being transcends location.


The full essay is at "Barbie."

Saturday, January 6, 2024

On Israel’s Public Relations Campaign against the Charge of Genocide

In theory, state media is more vulnerable to doing the bidding of its sponsoring government than are privately owned media companies. In practice, governments are able to pressure even private news outlets to sway public opinion for political purposes. Even allied governments can pressure the government of a country in which a private news company resides in terms of what stories to air and when to air them, in order to sway that country’s public opinion, and even global public opinion. The sudden appearances in print, online, and on television news networks of former Israeli hostages being interviewed just after the International Court of Justice had announced on December 29, 2023 that Israel would be tried on charges of genocide in Gaza. Not coincidentally, I submit, emotionally-charged hyperbole was used to pull emotional “heart-strings” in order to convince the world, including the justices at international court, that the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 had been so bad that even Israel’s extremely disproportionate military attacks in Gaza were justified and thus should not be considered to be genocidal. Besides the logic being flawed, for the infliction of such disproportional harm was not justified, and even a justified genocide would violate the Convention on Genocide, which Israel had agreed to be bound. In short, I suspect that much was happening behind the scenes not only in Israel, but also in the U.S. Government and even private media companies in the U.S. immediately following the Court’s announcement.


The full essay is at "Israel's Public Relations Offensive."