Reason hosted a pretty interesting debate between Kerry Howley, Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthy on freedom and property rights. I think I’m inclined towards McCarthy’s point of view, but you really should read the whole thing.

Does a drunken Tiger love his cage?
When he’s sober, the cage feels like home.
It feels comfortable and the mantra is sacrafice for principle.
When he’s had a few, the mantra feels like freedom at all costs.
Lying in the grass, that singular star says rage against the dying of the light.
But, home still feels like home.
And the little things feel like easy penance.
Does a drunken Tiger love his cage?

1 a: the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body b: a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings c: an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction

~the definition of Life, from the Merriam Webster dictionary (online).

I cannot reconcile myself with the four pillars of the “culture of death.”   Each pillar finds its support at times by various proponents at many points across the political spectrum, making the discussion of life vs death very difficult to pin down politically.  To me, abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia and war are all acts which end the life of a person (or persons) – either a very young person (or fetus), a very bad (or perhaps tragically innocent) person, an enemy, or a person who is either very old or in a great deal of emotional or physical pain.  They are all living beings in possession of a soul, however damnably bad or temporarily interred to the womb that soul may be.  Soul aside, if you happen to not believe in it, they are still human beings possessed of a potentiality that death will snuff out entirely.

A fetus possesses the potentiality of full personhood.  Indeed, there is little else a fetus could become save a baby.  The point at which life begins, scientifically speaking, is the moment of conception.  Philosophically, of course, life is easily redefined.  The debate over abortion often falls on this point.  Ironically, outside of the abortion debate few arguments exist about say the beginning of life for a plant (germination) on either side of the political spectrum.

A criminal condemned to death possess the potentiality to change, to find remorse, salvation etc.  They are also, as I mentioned above, quite possibly innocent.  Beyond this, I oppose the death penalty because it oversteps the reasonable bounds of the state – and in a democracy in particular makes citizens complicit in the extinguishing of human life, whether or not they wish to be.

War, is of course, a difficult concept to grapple with because it is not (always) the decision of a powerful entity to take the life of a non-powerful entity (think: mother and fetus; state and condemned; etc.).  It takes two to tango, as the saying goes.  However preemptive, expansionary, or aggressive wars can rightly be called unjust.  They take the potentiality of peace away from another party – the invaded state or tribe or region.

Assisted suicide generally involves the will of an individual over themselves.  I can envision a state of affairs in which euthanasia becomes the accepted function of the state over people deemed incapable of choosing for themselves (as a matter of efficiency, perhaps), which is not a totally unreasonable fear.  (Read Lois Lowry’s The Giver)  Even without such insidious action by the state, is it possible that the act of assisting someone to end their life robs them of their potential future?  A future which could include breakthroughs in medical science to remove their pain, cure their disease, etc. or a future which might bring some unexpected happiness to assuage their depression?  Or for those simply too old to want to go on living, perhaps a natural death on their own without the need of an assistant to act as usher?

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Following Chris’ very kind comment on Friday, I thought I would resume my digging into what my sputtering about glocalism and glocalization really means. It’s all fine and well to talk about “globalizing the local” (Chris’ summary) and maintaining global networks and interconnectivity that avoids visiting a corresponding violence upon local cultures and communities, but what is necessary for this idea to spark a real discussion is something approaching a coherent outline or structure. I’m getting there in bits and pieces, slowly but surely; however, the challenge here is that in some senses I’m still building the boat as I set sail. So I imagine that the whole project comes off a touch disjointed and schismatic.

I think Chris’ framing the discussion in terms of trying to introduce some verticality into Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Multitude is helpful and it is true that I have actually drawn some vague and abstract inspiration from Hardt and Negri’s vision. Truth be told, though, I have started and stopped Multitude three times now, never really getting into the meat of it. Most of my understanding of what Hardt Negri outline there within comes from conversations with a good friend who speaks both highly and critically of the work and a handful of videos on YouTube that I’ve watched primarily featuring Michael Hardt.

However, Multitude is back on deck in terms of my reading schedule and the last time I had started I was actually quite into it — coincidentally, I suspended that reading to take on Barnett’s Great Powers. I intend to make a sizable dent in the book over the course of this weekend and am hopeful that doing so will flesh out some ideas in some interesting ways.

But in terms of why glocalism’s bee is stuck in my blogging bonnet, I tend to take as much inspiration from my interactions with a variety of localists around the blogosphere and their articulation of an ideal, or at least more sustainable, enjoyable, and manageable world.

Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher, Nathan Origer, Russell Arben Fox (hell, basically everyone at Front Porch Republic), and here at the League our own E.D. Kain present what I consider to be a powerful and compelling analysis of our modern lives and the ways in which we might choose to alter those lives towards a better end. I lock horns with these characters as much as I do precisely because I am so impressed with the vision they present, which is a vision that underwrites a great many of the ways I live my life and the values that inform my life. [Read more →]

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that both sides of the “Did We Torture?” debate are doing themselves a big disservice in how they approach their arguments.  This perhaps isn’t surprising since I tend to think this is the case on most controversial hot-button topics.

The pro-waterboarding side’s real argument isn’t that waterboarding, etc., aren’t torture, which I think is a clearly losing argument that frankly disturbs the hell out of me.  By making that argument, they implicitly concede that whether it is “effective” is meaningless.

Similarly, the focus of the anti-waterboarding, etc. arguments is also too much on the morality issue.  I say this not because the argument is wrong, but because it’s so clearly right.  By even arguing it, we give the belief that it may be something less than torture more credibility than it deserves, thereby marginally increasing the possibility that it will become acceptable in even situations where thousands of lives are not potentially at stake.

The trouble is that for the vast majority of people, the issue isn’t whether torture is moral or immoral, but whether the results it provides warrant the breach of morality.  For some of us (and I include myself in that group), the morality breach is never or almost never worth it.  But that’s just not going to be the case for the vast majority of people in just about any nation.   Similarly, for some small number of people, there just is no morality issue at all.

But most people in a free society are far more concerned about their personal morality and decisionmaking than they are about their government’s morality.  This is as it perhaps should be – what good is having a moral government if all of its citizens are robbing and looting, murdering and beating?  And of course, a huge part of being a moral person is taking care of one’s family.  This means that relatively few people have the time or the interest to concern themselves much with the morality of their government, at least as long as their government is dealing with them and the people they know in a relatively moral fashion. 

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Those handful of Ordinary Gentle-readers who have followed me from my old site may recall my occasional posts publicizing the late South African reggae star Lucky Dube.  So if some of this sounds familiar to you, I apologize. 

The Wikipedia biography of his life is here.  His early reggae albums came out in the mid-80s, several years before the lies of apartheid would crumble, and after he had gained some success as the front man for a mbaqanga group – described as “pop music with heavy traditional Zulu influences.”  Despite threats of censorship, Lucky used the medium of reggae to attack apartheid, and his beautiful song “Together as One” became the first song by a black artist to ever get airplay on a white South African radio station. 

There’s always been something about reggae that has grabbed in a way that no other music seems to.  It is not, I assure you, its association with warm beaches and coconut palms, much as I enjoy warm beaches and coconut palms and think there’s nothing wrong with escapism as an excuse to like music.  Instead, reggae music grabs me because it conveys a way of life so utterly foreign to a white kid from the Jersey suburbs in a way that is undeniably heartfelt and authentic.  It is music that is not “about” the Third World, but is instead undeniably “of” the Third World, popular there because, like any good art, people can relate to it.  But for some reason, reggae, at least of the non-dancehall variety, has always been something that I also have been able to relate to; I don’t mean this in the sense that it allows me to fully understand life in the Third World – quite the opposite, in fact.  But there is often a passion and a spirit in reggae that conveys a combination of outward vulnerability and inner strength that is distinctly human, but which can only come out when we are with people we trust.  What makes reggae appealing to me, then, isn’t that it is music that is meant for my consumption, but precisely that my consumption of that music is purely an accident.

With Lucky Dube, that accident was a particularly happy one for me – I had never heard of him when I received his CD as a thoughtful gift from my mother, who only knew that I liked reggae but already owned most of the better-known reggae albums.  As it turned out, Lucky’s music was something truly special.

The influence of Lucky’s mbaqanga roots gave the music a unique feel of cheesy pop music, passionate reggae rhythms, beautiful African backup harmonies, and an uncompromising set of messages, sometimes distinctly universal, other times explicitly political.

When that message was universal, it combined a sometimes conflicted message of individual freedom, love of family, and desperation.  He sang not-infrequently about children and divorce.  When his message was overtly political, it was uncompromising in its opposition to violence and distrust of political authority, even post-apartheid. 

Ultimately, Lucky’s music was all about doing what is right, loving life, and being free.  He directed much attention towards lamenting the tragic juxtaposition of street violence against the backdrop of the end of apartheid.  In an industry that is often proudly homophobic, Lucky put out a song that explicitly begged for tolerance of gays.  He somewhat controversially took a stand against government taxation, claiming his government did nothing of value.  But whatever his essentially libertarian views of government (I doubt he ever heard the word “libertarian,” though), his passion for love, family, and non-violence were always front and center.

Sadly, in October 2007, he was shot and killed during an attempted carjacking in Johannesburg in front of his children while dropping them off for school.  For a man who was so publicly passionate about non-violence, family and children, and the value of education, a more sadly poetic death could not be imagined.

Rest in Peace, Lucky.  “Feel Irie”:

PS – For what it’s worth – in these times of apparent crisis after apparent crisis, I think we would all do well to remember that:

No matter how hard we try,
Trouble will find us one way or another.
People had troubles since the pope
Was an altar boy
People had worries from when the
Dead Sea was only critical
Hear those drums running and
Listen to those guitars skanking
Yeah… Put a smile on your face
Don’t let the troubles get you down

The loss of our self-understanding as parts of a whole meant that individuals who achieved material success were able to consider their achievement as fully their own. By contrast, those who happened to be counted among the “lazy and contentious” (Locke’s term) were understood to have failed on through their own fault alone. A society riven by self-congratulation and resentments was a likely outcome of this philosophical, economic and theological transformation…

Growth replaces virtue; material comfort stands in for solidarity.

Patrick Deneen writes a great deal more on this matter of unsustainable growth and the modern philosophy of wealth and individualism.  Indeed, he vocalizes much of what I’ve been thinking lately on the subject of economics and how the modern person identifies their own success; how modern communities have become more like clusters of individuals living in proximity with one another than “organisms” in their own right; and how the very modern, liberal philosophy of constant, rapid growth trumps all moral and ethical concerns.  Ironically, I think Deneen’s thinking here ties in rather well with Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” though I am only partway through that book so I can’t comment fully, and to some degree with Freddie’s post on individualism and safety nets.  Take, for instance, the quotation above.  If you’ve read any of “Outliers” perhaps you can see the continuity between individual success and opportunity provided by luck and community.

Deneen envisions a society built around localization and self-government, but not the libertarian vision of an anything-goes society.  In other words, not localization to do away with central control and expand liberty, but localization in order to restore community and order.  He rightly views unlimited freedom as antithetical to the human condition, and unlimited choice as quite the opposite of liberty.  Only in a materialistic society can these sort of beliefs thrive.  Growth replaces virtue; material comfort stands in for solidarity.

This is one reason I’m so taken with the new-urbanist movement, which seeks to build walkable communities in almost village like settings, with mixed zoning and attention paid to the aesthetic.  In our rush to provide convenience, we’ve created the commute, the fourteen lane highways, the isolated and sterile suburbs, the modern sense of disconnect.  We’ve disrupted the communal organism more and more until we barely have a notion left as to what it means to be a neighbor, what it means to be a part of a whole. Even our churches reflect this sentiment of individuality above all things.  Some even preach a gospel of wealth.

I doubt any legislation can restore this communal ethic, short of some redirection in our infrastructure – and perhaps in our thoughts on trade policy.

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