Adrift on a Sea of Change Pt. 2

While ignorance of history may condemn us to repeat our mistakes, it can also prevent us from repeating our successes. Following the Second World War, U.S. leaders were united in their belief that the future peace of Europe was unattainable if the defeated Axis powers were kept weak and humiliated. While there was a multiyear period of formal occupation and no formal end to the presence of American troops in Western Europe to this day, the United States also began almost immediately to rebuild all of Western Europe – in Allied and enemy nations alike – in the war’s aftermath.

Simultaneously, U.S. diplomats began laying the groundwork for the creation of formal economic and political ties among Western European nations – especially Germany and France – that would eventually evolve into today’s European Union. Our approach to post-war Japan was similar. It appears that among the lessons we learned after World War I was that defeated and isolated enemies present a threat to future stability and security. And we seemed to acknowledge that a teaspoon of magnanimity helped the medicine of American power go down.

This lesson clearly has application to today’s world. Granted, there are many and radical differences between the post-war balance of power and the structure of today’s international political environment. Nonetheless, there are enough similarities to make the application of a more magnanimous, collaborative approach to the world a compelling proposition.

The term “hubris” has been bandied about as characteristic of America’s attitude toward the world today, and with considerable justification. Underlying that hubris, however, is a more important misconception of the dynamics that are typical of the unipolar distribution of geostrategic power. Post-1989 U.S. presidents, and George W. Bush in particular, have failed to understand that the exercise of power by the world’s single hyperpower automatically implies compound costs that are not unlike “opportunity costs” in the world of economics. They are indirect costs that the hyperpower must bear that are to some extent hidden and not overtly accounted for by decision-makers because they are ideologically antithetical to the hyperpower’s dominant worldview.

Adrift on a Sea of Change

As the presidential campaign season heats up and the national conventions are in the offing, I want to continue for a while to focus on foreign affairs. I will add two more posts under the heading "Adrift on a Sea of Change" from my former blog, as I feel they offer a nice summary of what has transpired in U.S. foreign policy over the course of the past decade or so. Then I will begin to explore what comes next, in the hopes that someone is both thinking and listening.

From a certain perspective, U.S. foreign policy before and after the turn of the century presents the image of a vessel adrift on a sea of change. The geostrategic alignment of the international political system has shifted dramatically, in many ways to favor the United States. We have not weathered the success well, though, failing to adapt to our new status as the world’s only remaining superpower.

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy was conceived and executed within the strategic framework of “containment,” or the strategy of containing the spread of Soviet (or “communist”) power and influence in the world. After the ideological and economic collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States never found a replacement for containment as an overarching strategic policy direction. Our strategic national interests, which had for so long been defined against the backdrop of the Soviet monolith, now seemed shifting and uncertain.

What is tragically missing from U.S. foreign policy – and has been since at least 1989 – is a new strategic orientation to the world. Under successive Republican and Democratic administrations since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States has adopted a wide range of thematic tactical frameworks for foreign policy, sometimes employing multiple, conflicting frameworks simultaneously. Too often this orientation has put the United States on a reactive footing, forcing us to respond to events controlled by others. Rather than acting as the world’s policeman (a problematic role on its own merits), the United States has seemed more like its firefighter over the past 15 years.

As a result, our foreign policy record is riddled with numerous failures. More telling, though, are those successes that U.S. presidents have pointed to, such as the spread of democracy and the free market in the countries previously behind the Iron Curtain, the liberation of Kuwait, the end of open conflict in the Balkans, and the destruction of the al Qaeda infrastructure and removal from power of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In each of these cases, it can be argued that our success was only superficial, that we failed to see our policies through to their logical conclusions. In Eastern Europe, rapid economic and political progress in the early 1990s was followed by the onset of severe structural economic problems and a return to favor of former communist leaders. Political and economic reforms ground to a halt, most famously in Russia itself. In the Persian Gulf, the U.S. was successful in pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but our failure to destroy the Iraqi military and removing Saddam Hussein from power set up a decade of difficulties that ultimately precipitated last year’s invasion of Iraq. In the Balkans, the widespread warfare and genocide has ended, but many war criminals remain free, little reconciliation has occurred and ethnic conflict still regularly flares up. In Afghanistan, war lords still control vast amounts of territory and Osama bin Laden managed to escape – and still remains free today.

(Mis)Understanding Terrorism Pt. 2

As discussed in the previous posting, conceptualizing counter-terrorism in terms of a "war" reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the threat and can result in policies that are ineffective at increasing national security. In fact, an overly militarized approach to fighting terrorism carries with it a number of serious risks that have the potential to actually worsen the terrorist threat.

First, the absence of easily identifiable and clearly valuable military targets puts pressure on the U.S. government to find other targets against which military operations can be more successfully planned and conducted. Iraq certainly fits this category. Second, the high number of "enemy" and civilian casualties that accompany today’s bombing-intensive military tactics provides a wealth of symbolic resources that terrorists can use to generate renewed support and fresh recruits to their cause. Iraq again provides an unfortunate example. Following the officially declared "end" of hostilities in the Spring of 2003, the presence in Iraq of Islamic terrorists actually increased rather than subsided.

As President Bush rightly, albeit unintentionally, stated just prior to the 2004 Republican convention, a "war" on terrorism is never winnable precisely because the nature of the terrorist enemy denies the possibility that capturing territory, destroying armies or crippling infrastructure – all basic goals in war – will defeat them. What the terrorist threat calls for instead is a more nuanced strategy that combines certain military efforts with simultaneous campaigns on the intelligence, law enforcement, political, economic and even cultural fronts.

Where there are identifiable and clearly valuable terrorist targets that can be destroyed militarily, we should use overwhelming military force in surgical strikes and aggressive attacks with tightly defined objectives. But we also need to build stronger alliances with like-minded nations to use our collective political and economic resources to provide a viable alternative to young Muslims who believe they are living under oppressive conditions. We must begin an aggressive cultural campaign to remake the image of America in the Arab world, which can never happen until we insist on an equitable settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Many Americans would find such suggestions offensive because they imply that we are partially responsible for terrorism. Until we acknowledge that our policies, right or wrong, have made some contribution to the conditions that spawn hatred of America, we cannot possibly understand and defeat our terrorist enemies. We did not invade Iraq in order to kill Iraqi civilians, but we cannot deny that our actions caused a significant number of noncombatant deaths in Iraq. Similarly, while our policies in the Middle East are not intended to incite hatred of America and contribute to the conditions that make terrorism possible, we cannot deny those unintended side-effects.

None of this necessarily suggests that we should withdraw our support for Israel or refuse to pursue our interests in the Arab world. But we must understand that we do not execute these policies in a vacuum. Our own actions generate a ripple effect that sometimes advances and sometimes undermines U.S. interests in the Middle East and the world.

I originally posted this entry and the previous one on the nature of the terrorist threat and America's reponse to it on a former, now-defunct blog that I wrote in 2005. I believed it was important to refresh and repost these arguments here given the focus on foreign policy and national security in the current presidential campaign. It is time for us to set aside petty school-yard political attacks and seriously confront the geostrategic challenges we face as a nation. I hope to continue to post entries on these topics in the coming weeks and months and make my own small contribution to the debate.

(Mis)Understanding Terrorism

It is sad to admit it, but terrorism more than anything else seems to be the defining attribute of the 21st century so far. While the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, provide the most extreme instance of terrorist violence in history, the first few years of this century have witnessed many massive acts of terrorism, from Bali to Spain to Russia.

The response of the Bush administration has been to launch a massive “war” on terror that began with the invasion of Afghanistan and the dismantling of al Qaeda’s infrastructure there. The war on terror eventually encompassed a broad range of U.S. initiatives, including actions as diverse as international intelligence and law enforcement efforts targeted against suspected terrorists, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and other dramatic changes to the U.S. government, but the emphasis and focus has always been on military tools.

The Bush administration even placed its invasion of Iraq under the umbrella “war on terror” term, despite the absence of any credible ties between Iraq and active terrorist organizations. In today’s political rhetoric, any potential threat to the United States that is even loosely related to the Islamic world or a non-governmental entity is made to fit into the global terrorist threat catch-all.

The Bush administration’s behavior and its public statements about terrorism and other threats reveal some fundamental misunderstandings that doom our nation and our allies to continued terrorist attacks and failed policies in places like Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Talking about terrorism in terms of “war” reveals a dramatically inaccurate assessment of the enemy. Much like the British during the American Revolution and the United States in Vietnam, the Bush administration is thinking about terrorists as conventional enemies that can be engaged in a military conflict in which the stronger side will prevail. But even more so than guerrilla warriors throughout history, terrorists are difficult to find and isolate. In a new twist on this old theme, terrorists are driven by an ideology of hate and a murderous ethic that respects no national boundaries and is difficult to define geographically.

President Bush and other administration officials periodically pay lip-service to this amorphous nature of our terrorist enemies, but the administration’s actions seem more aligned to a conflict with a conventional opponent. By treating the struggle against terrorism as a war, we are misconstruing the nature of the fight, selecting methods and weapons that are poorly matched to the situation and the enemy and using our nation’s vast resources ineffectively. Our error is compounded when we disingenuously incorporate actions like the invasion of Iraq into the “war on terror” in a bid for sustained public support when such campaigns are at most only indirectly related to defeating terrorism.

In my next posting, I will explore the specific ways in which the “war” label in the context of counter-terrorism leads to policy choices that ultimately work in opposition to the stated objective of ending the threat of terrorism.

Three Umpires

I recently participated in a retreat at work. At this retreat, an attorney gave a presentation on the company's standard of ethics. One of four elements of ethical behavior at the company is "Honesty," and the following phrase was included in the description of what we mean when we say "honesty" at my company: ...we always 'tell it like it is'...

At a dinner that evening, I explained to the attorney that I find this statement quite troubling, which he had difficulty understanding. So, I told him the story of the three umpires, which goes like this.

Three umpires are having a disagreement over how to call balls and strikes. The first umpire says, "Some pitches are balls and some are strikes, and I call 'em what they are." The second umpire says, "Some pitches are balls and some are strikes, and I call 'em like I see 'em." The third umpires pauses a moment, looks at both his colleagues and then says with a smile, "They ain't nothin' 'til I call 'em!"

I asked the attorney which umpire was like our company. He didn't answer the question, but it was clear to everyone at the table that we see the world like the first umpire. It was also obvious to all of us that the third umpire did the best job of "telling it like it is."

The wisest people and most successful organizations understand that they have the potential to shape reality with their words.

Freedom and Identity

So, what does identity have to do with freedom? The basis of my argument is that how I answer the question, "Who am I?" has a lot to do with the answer to the question, "What am I free to do?"

I should make clear that much of the thinking here is far from original and is merely a distillation of what many have thought before. My friend and I did, however, offer a somewhat unique (if exceedingly minor) addition to this line of research and theory with a paper in 2006.

Basically, this all has to do with a particular understanding of the relationship among language, meaning and action. Someone once told me that rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke said that to call a man a murderer is to prepare for a hanging in the morning. I don't know whether Burke actually said that, but it is consistent with what he and others understand to be a fundamental characteristic of language -- We speak our world. What we say about something has an awful lot of influence over what we do about it. This is because language -- the words we use -- is the basis for the meanings we make. And I define meaning to be a socially constructed symbolic framework for action.

The meaning(s) I have for something both results from the language I use in relation to it and triggers how I act in toward it. The same can be said for the self. The identity I have is basically a collection of meanings that I have (and others have -- we have together) about who I am. That identity then forms the basis for how I act. If I construct (with others) an identity for myself that includes the element "idiot," then I am highly unlikely to consider obtaining a PhD among my options (unless I find that to be a legitimate pursuit for idiots). Therefore, my freedom to act -- in this case to enter a doctoral program, complete my coursework, pass my candidacy exams, complete my dissertation and successfully defend it, thus earning a PhD -- is constrained by my identity, my self-concept.

Now, there is a legitimate question regarding whether or not I possess the intellectual potential to successfully complete a doctoral program. Nonetheless, there is also a possibility that even if I have adequate intellectual potential, my identity may be structured in such a way as to preclude me from exercising true choice if it excludes this potential as part of my self-concept.

The point my friend and I made in the paper mentioned above is that we cannot ever come close to "true" freedom unless we raise our awareness of how our identity could be constraining our freedom of action by automatically limiting our range of choices. Alternatively, the extent to which we cede control over our identities to others, we enslave ourselves to them. This is how Madison Avenue makes its money.

On Freedom

In our society, we often think of freedom in terms of political systems and our place in them. Seldom do we turn our attention to the question of identity and the extent to which "who we are" either expands or contracts our freedom.

First, we should probably work out what we mean when we say "freedom." We could take 20 paragraphs or more to work our way to a definition, but let me try a shortcut: Freedom is the ability to exercise choices regarding the nature and quality of our existence. (If you would like to challenge that definition, let's work it out in the comments.)

So, if I were truly free, I could make a series of choices that would determine all the circumstances of my life. Nothing would be beyond my control or outside the realm of social possibility. (Yes, for those of you paying attention, my use of italics indicates that I've introduced something potentially troublesome here. Pay attention!) I feel the need to say social possibility, because I'm assuming the absence of a magical ability to control physical possibility. For example, I am making the assumption that I cannot be free to float effortlessly 10 feet off the ground. The law of gravity says that an object with my mass within a certain proximity to the earth cannot do that, and there is no political or social mechanism I know of that will allow me to overturn or suspend enforcement of the law of gravity.

All of the non-physical things (I could draw an essential v. existential dichotomy here, but I won't. That would just beg a vicious critique from some world-renowned expert in phenomenology or existential philosophy, and I don't have the philosophical guns to endure that fight. Not that any such experts are reading this blog.), however, are in. I'm talking about whom I love and how I love them, whom I hate and how I hate them (if anyone, in either category) -- where I work, if I work at all, what I eat, what religion I observe, if I observe any at all, what clothes I wear, what car I drive, what name I call myself and others call me, how long I wear my hair, what sports I play, what music I listen to, what thoughts I have, what political philosopies (or other philosophies of a non-political nature) I espouse, if any, how I express myself, and to whom, if to anyone at all, etc., etc., etc.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, "Self, he hasn't dealt with issues of social mores or laws and their violation. Such as, does he mean by social freedom the ability to murder someone, with or without being held accountable and potentially punished for his actions?" I wouldn't blame you one bit for having had that thought. I had it myself. And then I had this one: "Ah, self, don't you see? The question of murder is just as contingent as the question of freedom, social or otherwise. It depends on context-specific definition. If I walk into my neighbor's house carrying my Glock 26 and pump 10 rounds into his head, it's murder. If I push the button that launches a Tomahawk cruise missile that kills 20 enemy combatants it's war. One act is worthy of life in prison or even execution, the other makes me a hero. Murder is in the eye of the beholder."

So, then in the middle of all this, what is this thing called freedom? We must return to my original contention that freedom has everything to do with identity -- which happens to have everything to do with the social construction of reality. But that's a very long conversation for another day. I know you all can hardly contain your eagerness for that next post.

UP NEXT: FREEDOM AND IDENTITY

On Faith

In the first substantive post on this "new" blog I promised to come back to faith, or rather a discussion of what is meant by the term "faith" as opposed to "belief." I believe such a distinction is important to understanding much of what is going on around us today. Indeed, I have faith in the importance of this distinction.

If you were to visit my previous and short-lived blog, The Critical Path (http://www.thecriticalpath.blogspot.com), you would quickly learn of my affinity for Northrop Frye. I discovered Frye during my graduate work at the University of Dayton thanks to my Rhetoric professor, Dr. Wade Kenny (check out his bio page here: www.msvu.ca/publicrelations/faculty_profiles.asp#Robert_Wade_Kenny). I find it somewhat difficult to say something like, "Frye was an English professor," though such a statement would be true. I would feel better saying that he is one of the most important theorists of literary criticism, discourse and symbolism of the last century. He spent a fair bit of his career on the literary criticism of the Bible, was drawn to the imaginative capacity of the human spirit and created systemic tools for the analysis of discourse and literary structure that have the power to change your very life.

I encourage you to explore Northrop Frye yourself. You can start here: http://vicu.utoronto.ca/fryecentre/ Of course, I would recommend reading some of Frye’s works, but where to start? Let’s leave that question for another post and get on with the matter at hand, which takes us to a little essay by Frye entitled, "The Dialectic of Belief and Vision" (Myth and Metaphor: Selected essays 1974-1988, pp. 93-107. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1990).

In this essay, Frye spends some time talking about the difference between belief and faith. Frye writes, "Belief to me refers to a state of mind, faith to its expression in action" (author’s emphasis retained). This is very close to my own understanding of the concepts. I can say that I believe it will rain tomorrow, but I express my faith in the forecast by walking out the door with an umbrella in hand.

So what? Why am I taking the time to draw this distinction, which might seem obvious to you? Let’s try a different illustration to get closer to the real issue at hand. I can say I believe in equal opportunity, but do I have faith if I fail to challenge the racist statement made by my boss over lunch? I might believe the death penalty has a place in democratic society, but my faith is in question unless I am willing to pull the switch and electrocute the guilty prisoner.

We live in a world of belief, and faith increasingly becomes a relic of generations past. We are so far removed from the killing of our food, the extraction of our resources from the earth and the protection of our democracy from the threats of terrorists abroad or neo-conservatives at home that we cannot honestly be considered faithful members of our society. Believers one and all we are. Faithful we are not. Put that in your religious flux capacitor and see where you end up.

Stephen Stills told us that we find the cost of freedom buried in the ground. Who will pay today?

UP NEXT: On Freedom

Inertia

So much has happened since my last post -- in the world and in my life -- but I have captured none of it. For example, I was stricken by a series of migraines that really shook my world. I began to think that my life was forever to be changed, held hostage to this inexplicable pain that appeared on the scene at the most inconvenient of times. That very well still could be the case in the long run, yet I am currently enjoying a respite of a month plus from these awful headaches. I found great solace in The Migraine Blog on the Web site of the New York Times (http://migraine.blogs.nytimes.com/). I would recommend it to anyone who suffers or anyone with a close relationship with one who suffers from migraines.

Despite this physical turmoil, I have written numerous speeches for executives at my company, traveled to China and India, started my second season coaching softball for my daughter's team, helped my friend with PR for his spectacular film (which has shown at SXSW and the Sarasota Film Festival so far), grown tired -- no exhausted -- with the interminable Democratic presidential primaries, and now I'm helping my brother end his marriage and move on to happier times.

And, that long-awaited Spring has finally sprung. Much has happened. Nothing has been written. This must change.

6 More Weeks

This is afterall the Woodchuck's Corner, so we'd be remiss not to share the news. Punxatawney Phil emerged from his stump this morning and encountered his own shadow. That means six more weeks of winter weather. No early spring for the weary. Stay warm!

Soft Landing for a Superpower?

I recommend that everyone spend some time with the cover story by Parag Khanna in today's New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ref=magazine). In "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony," Khanna makes a strong argument that the international political order is no longer the unipolar system dominated by the United States that followed the Cold War.

Due to America's failure to seize the opportunity to build a new, durable world order centered on liberal democracy and free enterprise, an opportunity seems to have slipped away. Khanna argues that a new "Big 3" -- the United States, Europe and China -- now share world dominance among them. He also argues that U.S. power will continue to diminish as a resurgent Europe and booming China compete for dominance in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

It's hard to know anything about history and not acknowledge that all good (or evil) empires must come to an end. The question on my mind is whether America can engineer a soft landing. What do you think?

Perpetual Prosperity

I know I've been hammering capitalism a bit on this blog, but it seems to be occupying my mind quite a bit these days. This week was no exception. I arrived in New York on Tuesday morning at almost the same time the Fed announced its emergency 0.75 point cut in the federal funds rate. By the time I left the city, House leaders had agreed with the White House on the basic elements of an "economic stimulus" package to help right the listing ship of the U.S. economy.

It was a flurry of activity that dominated the media agenda for the week. Talk of recession, inflation and what could be done to stop the downward spiral reverberated off the skycrapers of Manhattan, the corridors of Capitol Hill and the backs of auditoriums in South Carolina. It all seemed like an odd frenzy to me, born more from perception than hard economic data. In fact, it appears that market indicators are mixed at worst, with as many reasons for optimism as despair. Yet the skittish traders on Wall Street joined the nervous pundits on cable TV to fuel a nation's fears.

Let's just accept the pervailing wisdom for a moment that a recession is in the offing. So what? Isn't it normal for economies to go through cycles of expansion and contraction? That's what I remember from the few economics courses I took as an undergrad. It seems, however, that our patience for the natural ebb and flow of things has worn thin. In our hubris, we believe we no longer need to be subject to forces of nature, be they upticks in the global temperature or downturns in the national economy. Our wealth, our comfort, our mastery over all things must continuously be on the rise.

It's ironic, though, that this perpetual prosperity seems only to benefit those who already have the most, while the poorest among us drop deeper into despair. I believe that sooner or later it must all come crashing down unless we're willing to replace greed as the driving force in our society with some other, more sustainable value. What might it be?

Quarterlife v. "real" life

This blog is part of a new initiative I launched in my own life to try to connect with social media and the whole Web 2.0 movement. I have a facebook profile, I have a flickr page (see first post), I'm doing this blog, and I even gave Second Life a spin. The initiative is born out of a commitment I have to authentic criticism. W. H. Auden argued that criticism of art (and life, by extension) requires "a vast experience of all artistic activities" (see "The Mental Kitchen" in the Readings feature of Harper's, December 2007 -- sorry, it's what I'm reading now, so you're stuck with it for the moment).

I had been offering ignorant criticism of social media as actually being pseudo-social media. What I mean is that it seemed ironic to me that everyone was turning to mediation (which the Internet is) as a new method of social interaction. If you want to have connection to more people or a broader or deeper connection with some, why would you turn to a digital interface rather than to the actual living faces, voices, embraces of those people? Does online interaction get you closer to people or act as yet another barrier between you and the "authentic" world?

Clearly, there is much to debate in the above, and much debating I have done. I have engaged on this topic mostly with younger people, acknowledging that at the ripe old age of 38 I might be so out of touch with the world of twenty-somethings and teens that I risk appearing like the grumpy old men in the SNL skit from the 80s that I'm old enough to remember.

There are two important things I learned from these debates. First, that social media do not replace direct interaction in most cases for most users. They augment it. There are exceptions -- those geeks who seem to live out their entire lives online in fantasy scenarios -- but those exceptions of antisocial reclusivity are not new to 2008 or created by new technology. Second, my criticism of social media was ignorant, as I stated above, because I had not experienced it. In my conversations on the topic, it quickly became clear that I needed to either stop judging social media or dive in and see what it's all about.

As I took the plunge, I encountered something called "Quarterlife." It's an Internet-only TV show (is it really TV if it's not on TV? -- this will be a moot point soon: Quarterlife will debut as an NBC series in February) born on MySpace.com. It has since migrated to its own Web site (check it out here: http://www.quarterlife.com/index.php) with lots of features in addition to the now 21 short episodes of the show (and counting).

It's created by the writing/producing team of Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of thirty something and My So-Called Life. I quite like the show and have watched every episode. The thing that fascinates me most is how the show and the Web site incorporate social media into a crazy cycle of hyperreality that French philosopher Jean Beaudrillard would have a field day unpacking.

Let's see if I can do it justice. It's a show that appears only online as part of an online community (first MySpace and now Quarterlife) about a group of twenty-something friends seen partially through the lens of character Dylan Krieger's videoblog that appears on a Web site that is part of an online community. But wait, there's more: The show's Web site also has social networking features like viewer profiles complete with blogs, videoblogs, photo galleries, "friends" networks, music, etc. Even more interesting, the characters of the show have their own profile pages where they blog and post videos, photos, etc. -- in character. Then, viewers, many of whom have their own profile pages, post comments on the characters' posts, often treating the characters as if they were real people.

OK, so you have so many layers of reality, with art imitating life imitating art and so on that I think my brain is going to explode. In the middle of all this, I think it is worth asking the question, What is real? Does it matter? Is interaction really "social" when you're interacting with a fictional character in a virtual environment? I don't have the answer, but I think I have a much better feel for the question.

Belief and Capitalism

I’m up too late doing work, listening to jazz and having a nice glass of Spanish wine. As I wait for someone to send me a file that I need to complete my project, I thought I’d take a moment to comment on an essay I read earlier in the evening.

I’m perpetually behind in my reading. That’s true on two levels at least. There’s all the great works of philosophy, literature, rhetoric, sociology, communication theory, ethics, religion, etc. that wait impatiently on my lifetime reading list constantly reminding me of what little I know. Then there’s also all the magazine and journal articles I’d like to be reading to stay "current," as they say. Yet, I’m never current with such reading. Frustration abounds.

At any rate, I cracked open the December 2007 issue of Harper’s this evening, which isn’t all that tardy for me. I generally start with the Notebook column (even though it’s not always written by Lewis Lapham these days, it’s still usually a great read) and then hit whatever seems most interesting in the rest of the magazine.

(I have the feeling that I’ll never get the hang of this blogging business unless I can learn to dispense with all the introductory detail, such as what appears in the first three paragraphs of this post. So, on with it.)

In last month’s Notebook column entitled "Hot Air Gods," Curtis White (click here for his faculty info at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, of all places: http://www.english.ilstu.edu/people/profile.aspx?ulid=ckwhite) uses the banality of belief (as a cultural phenomenon or trait) in America as the pathway to get at some important truths about capitalism. White argues that capitalism has been so effective in structuring reality that it is above criticism. "What capitalism has successfully obscured is the fact that the competition it prizes is not just between business entities internal to it but between capitalism as such and all other possible systems of value." By so doing, capitalism is above reproach as it has "succeeded in convincing the people living under it that it is not a system at all but a state of nature."

White’s essay evokes the arguments of Jules Henry in Culture Against Man, in which he describes the "technological drivenness" of our "pecuniary culture" that will eventually extract everything organic from human existence, replacing it with the cold, synthetic detritus of reflexive consumption. Instead of embracing a "culture of life," says White, capitalists see "nature and humanity ‘instrumentally,’ as things to be manipulated rationally and technically for profit" (author’s emphasis retained).

The implications of what White and Henry have to say are profound. Why am I sitting here at midnight waiting for an e-mail to meet a next-day deadline? Perhaps I see no alternative. Maybe what I need is not so much belief, but faith. More about that later.