Update: I’ve been asked to link to some translations. Here is the Perseus Project Symposium English translation which includes the Greek linked at the right. There is also the Internet Classics Archive Benjamin Jowett translation. Angie Hobbs did a great podcast on erotic love in the Symposium. Here is the Gutenberg Project’s Jowett translation. Google Books also has a translation.

As planned, today (technically, tomorrow) I’d like to get a conversation going about Plato’s Symposium. What I’ve done is to write down some questions while reading the text. They certainly aren’t exhaustive or expert, but I think they’re a start. Also, I would definitely not take them as a questionnaire. Instead of trying to answer all of them, please feel free to post comments about whatever questions strike your interest, or pose questions of your own.

The theme of the Symposium is éros, which can be defined as desire or longing, often of a passionate nature. Socrates, of course, has a very different definition. Any students of classical Greek are hereby invited to offer additional definitions.

As the framing story sets the stage, we hear about Aristodemus, a student who is in love with Socrates. A lot of students fall in love with Socrates. A repeating theme here and in other dialogues is the (homo) erotic aspect of the search for truth. Should we understand philosophical education as, in some sense, basically erotic?

The conversation turns to a recent symposium. The symposium was a sort of ritualized drinking party. Often conversation at a symposium would focus on a chosen topic. Here, the question is how best to celebrate the god of love. [Read more →]

Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have replied to a criticism made by me and others of their attack on mass transit. Here’s their response:

Many, many blog posts have been written about two words in this passage: “The Left’s search for a foreign template to graft onto America grew more desperate. Why couldn’t we be more like them — like the French, like the Swedes, like the Danes? Like any people with a larger and busier government overawing the private sector and civil society? You can see it in Sicko, wherein Michael Moore extols the British national health-care system, the French way of life, and even the munificence of Cuba; you can hear it in all the admonitions from left-wing commentators that every other advanced society has government child care, or gun control, or mass transit, or whatever socialistic program or other infringement on our liberty we have had the wisdom to reject for decades.” The two words are “mass transit.”

Contrary to our least literate critics, nothing in that passage suggests that we consider subways an infringement on our liberty. Nor does it mean that we are skeptical of mass-transit subsidies because the policy strikes us as European. It means something closer to the opposite: that we suspect that much of the enthusiasm for these subsidies among liberals is based on mass transit’s association with Europe.

Unfortunately, Lowry and Ponnuru don’t say very much here to reassure their sincere critics. They tell us that they never meant to say that mass transit was an infringement on liberty, but don’t deny or even address the fact that they did suggest, whatever their intent, that transit is a socialistic program that we are wise to reject. That is clear enough to any reader of English. While their writing here is regrettably loose, it isn’t sloppy enough to totally obscure their point.

I wish they had acknowledged that what they said made no sense, or at least backed away from it quietly. Instead, they continue to dismiss liberals who argue for mass transit on the basis that these liberals might be looking to foreign templates. This is extremely unhelpful. Mass transit is not the love child of left-wing infatuation with Europe. It’s a policy with a long American history that should be debated on its merits.

[Read more →]

Austin Bramwell has penned a very convincing post over at The American Conservative on why school choice can actually lead to the dumbing-down of our schools in the name of egalitarianism and accountability.  By ‘convincing’ I mean that I have been convinced by it, and that it has pulled me back from the brink of school choice advocacy and the adoption of pro-voucher views.  For some time I’ve been drifting further and further from my initial anti-school-choice (especially anti-voucher) position toward one more amenable to school choice.  Various horror stories have helped contribute to this drift, and I’m ashamed to say that the alarmism these stories inspired have helped form my opinions of public schools and the need for more school competition.  The fact of the matter is that our public schools are sometimes very good and sometimes very bad.  It depends on where you are.  It depends on who you are.  It depends not only on the state you live in but also the district.  It may even depend only on the teacher.

Bramwell writes:

America’s public schools are one example of how even governments, when subject to market discipline, can produce a superior product. Compare Soviet arms during the Cold War.  The Soviets excelled at producing weapons because otherwise foreign governments wouldn’t have purchased them.  Similarly, some public schools consistently excel, because otherwise they could not attract the best parents and students, thereby allowing those schools to excel, thereby attracting more good parents and students, and so on in a virtuous cycle.  In both cases, governments — in contrast to the usual rule — have had to compete for customers.

The “accountability” movement, however, wishes to match customers with schools as planners, rather than the customers themselves, deem fit. School vouchers, for example, a favorite policy of “accountability” proponents, punish those very school systems that have already worked very hard, thank you very much, to attract the best students and most civic-minded parents. (It’s no surprise that vouchers have proven to be politically unpopular, including if not especially among Republican voters.) Similarly, shutting down failing schools and redistributing their students punishes those schools that have performed marginally better and thereby attracted marginally better students and parents. The “accountability” movement, in short, wants to equalize the quality of educational products, no matter the price paid for them.  Whatever this merits of this policy, it surely does not show much faith in the free market.

[…]

Similarly, there is a hidden mechanism that makes the American School System work, and which modern planners ignore — namely, freedom of movement, which creates a well-functioning market for public education.  Planners such as “accountability” advocates who want to turn bad schools into good ones (and, often, by implication, vice versa), no matter what their scheme, are doomed to disappointment.

No matter how you spin it, American education is and always will be a local issue.  One-size-fits-all solutions mandated at the federal level will simply fail despite their many good intentions.  School choice may have some benefits if it’s home-grown and cultivated in an organic fashion by local communities. Some districts may truly benefit from the addition of a few good charter schools. But no race to the top federal program based on sticks and carrots will achieve this anymore than weakening public schools through vouchers will.

Perhaps we should stop thinking that all schools should be equal, or that all students will get an equal shot at a good education.  Maybe they all should, but they certainly won’t, no matter how much we wish it were so.  That may sound terrible, but there will always be better and worse schools, and there will always be more capable and less capable students, and luckier and less lucky draws.  And in many ways it’s odd that school choice advocates should be so egalitarian in their thinking, so starry-eyed and optimistic.

If we really want better schools in the areas that have the poorest results, we’ll have to fix communities first.  And communities will need to do that from the ground up, not Washington down.  That’s no simply task, but it is at least more realistic than thinking we can fix schools through federal legislation or by issuing standardized tests or pushing all students toward higher education or by sucking money from the public schools and redistributing it into private ones.

Maybe some kids would be better off learning a trade rather than finishing four years of high school and attempting college.  Maybe that’s another way we can bring schools and communities back together – by reviving the long-dead apprenticeship model and getting kids working in valuable trades and accruing that much-needed work experience.  That’s only one idea, and it will work in some places and not in others.

Just like the problems facing schools and school districts around the country, the successes lie in local solutions.  One district may be crippled by a too-strong teacher’s union; another school may have incompetent administrators; still others may have spent too much for too little and are now facing huge cuts and budgets on the precipice of collapse.  All these problems are unique and have unique solutions.  But keeping education local also means that we have thousands of little laboratories to measure the success or failure of various reforms.  No one solution will ever be the magic fix because no magic fix exists.

I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.

The suspected assassination of senior Hamas military commander  Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai by the Israeli Mossad on January 19 has caused me a good deal of consternation from the outset. But this latest story from the Daily Caller showing a “soar” in the Mossad’s popularity and a run on paraphernalia bearing the slogan, “Don’t Mess with the Mossad” is just too much (h/t: Sullivan).

I’ve been going back and forth with myself for the past few weeks about why the assassination bothers me so much. Especially as someone who has reconciled himself, however unhappily, to the reality that in some instances state sanctioned violence will be a necessary evil in combating certain geo-political players.

One can’t deny how controlled and contained the whole thing was. As Andrew himself said in his original post on the matter,

In fighting murderous Jihadist terrorists, I have to say I find this kind of surgical execution, however awful, to be morally superior to the collateral deaths of so many innocent children and civilians, as occurred in the Gaza war under the rules of conduct the IDF allowed. It’s also morally more defensible than the US drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where civilian casualties are both morally deeply troubling and strategically terrible in a war that I continue to believe is essentially unwinnable.

I can’t disagree with Andrew on any of that, per se. I mean, I’m not prepared to completely forgo the conclusion that this man deserved to die and that the Mossad, if they did indeed carry out the operation, were the right people to make that happen. I can’t disagree with the idea that a method avoiding civilian casualties, innocent children amongst them, is preferable to one that does not.

But it is precisely the “surgical execution” of this operation that gives me pause and makes me shudder. Though I think it is sometimes necessary to use precisely this kind of state sanctioned violence towards certain ends, I correspondingly think that we have a moral obligation to reckon in an unflinching manner with the ramifications of our decision. I believe that no matter what form it happens to take, the use of state sanctioned violence is an ugly thing that ought to cause us grief no matter the seeming righteousness of our cause.

The ugliness of military activity, whether it is in Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere, is always easy to spot. It is, essentially, inescapable. These more traditional forms of military might and use of force are honest insofar as they force us to grapple with the implications of our decision.

But the cool and almost bloodless efficacy of this type of operation — and assassination of this kind — it seems almost designed to lull us into a false consciousness of complacency about the tactics we choose to engage in dealing with, admittedly, unavoidable conflict. And in providing such a respite from the penetrating eyes of innocent children, we morally short change ourselves and others by willfully choosing a path of cognitive and ethical blindness and dissonance.

The natural outcome of such cowardice is a kind of self-serving bravado that cultivates slogans like, “Don’t Mess with the Mossad” and Marty Peretz’s borrowed line,

The Mossad did it. And, as Carly Simon sang about James Bond, “nobody does it better.”

Bravado of the like isn’t just offensive in the cavalier dismissiveness of its attitude, it is, in fact, anathema to the character, disposition, and fortitude required to actually bring an end to the generations old warring into which it faces. Bravado of this variety isn’t ultimately aimed at ending one of the world’s most horrific conflicts; indeed, it not so subtly feeds into it, prolongs it, sustains it.

And those penetrating eyes, we don’t lift them from our conscience, nor scrub their blood from our hands. Deep down we all know that, at best, we put them off to another day.

I’m a little late to my Lost blogging again – mainly because I didn’t end up watching ‘Sundown’ until this past Friday.  I thought it was a good episode.  Very dark.  The show is getting decidedly creepier this season.  In any case, more after the leap… [obviously, spoiler alert]

As the League’s resident ordained clergyman to be, I read with piqued interest Br. Jason’s take on Ross Douthat’s take on the American take on contemporary religious mysticism.

Jason quotes this passage from Baba Ross D:

[It may be that] something important is being lost as well. By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

Jason comments:

I have a hard time seeing anything other than snobbery here. America is a mass-produced society, the first and the most resolute of the type. You want full-time mystics? We do happen to have those by the dozens. You want a weekend — but only just a weekend — of mystical transport? Heck, we invented that trip.

Whether Ross is being a snob I’m not sure (maybe? partially?); I’ll leave that to the readers to make up their own minds.

But I think a similar or related critique of pop mysticism could be made that wouldn’t be intrinsically snobby.

To wit, Ram Dass (nee Richard Alpert), one of the godfathers of the LSD mystical hit turned pilgrimage to India, author of the magisterially trippy (Remember) Be Here Now (from which the above picture is taken), said the real issue was “altered traits not altered states.”

I would further say (contra Ross and seconding Jason) that the American phenomenon of religion, from its inception, is, as Harold Bloom argued, spiritual experientialism:  Pentecostalism, Revivalism (out of which grew Joseph Smith and the uniquely American religion of Mormonism), The Great Awakenings, The Shakers, New Thought movements, Esalen, William James and the scientific study of mysticism, pre Vatican II “High” Roman Catholic Eucharistic Adoration and Liturgy, Spiritualism, Billy Graham stadium spectacles, and now since the 60s the entrance of Eastern forms of mystical experience.

America , as Jason says, is a mass-produced society and so we mass produce mystical experiences–whether in sports, sex, even cooking.  And of course in various meditation practices, retreats and so forth.  (I’m 2 out of 3 on that scale, which, as they say, ain’t bad.).  And of course drugs as temporary ecstatic states, technically exogenous mystical states (which I definitely have never experienced).  Meditation-induced states are labeled endogenous.

Still, these are all leave open the issue of altered traits, not altered states.  As in, a person can have all kinds of altered states but if their traits aren’t altered, what’s been gained really?

This isn’t snobbery but to ask, “What’s the point?” Or in 1980s language, “Where’s the (transformative) beef?”  Though I’m not sure that later question will go over with a lot of would be seekers, (of the Eastern-influenced variety), given the popularity of vegetarianism in such circles.

Mystical states are generally higher potential capacities of the human body-mind.  I would say they are only “higher” insofar as humans haven’t yet adapted to them as common occurrences as a species.  [You might call that view a naturalized mysticism if you like].  That means they have a relative value and can be good things, but they can also be (as mystics of all traditions have long pointed out), just another source of egocentrism–in fact arguably an even more pernicious form of egocentrism as now you are (as a friend of mine once said), “Enlightened yes, but still an asshole.”

But it leaves open the question of an Absolute Awakening (often incorrectly called mystical/spiritual).  What Ram Dass above calls Absolute Compassion and therefore a changed way of being human at fundamental levels of identity, emotion, speech, bodily action, and thought.  As opposed to temporary groovy experiences or “getting spiritually high” (with or without actually getting high).   [Read more →]

All sorts of interesting this morning from Ross Douthat, regarding America and the mystical experience. He writes:

Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

On senses, though, that he’s looking for virtue in a whorehouse. It would be odd indeed if our most political religious leaders — that is, those whom we can most easily label as conservative or liberal — were attempting to get us mystical, by way of political action. It would be odd, and more than a little scary.

But next he writes:

Yet by some measures, mysticism’s place in contemporary religious life looks more secure than ever. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re encountering the divine all over the place. In 1962, after a decade-long boom in church attendance and public religiosity, Gallup found that just 22 percent of Americans reported having what they termed “a religious or mystical experience.” Flash forward to 2009, in a supposedly more secular United States, and that number had climbed to nearly 50 percent.

Given that in the meantime our culture discovered magic mushrooms and LSD, I am hardly bowled over. This is not as flippant as it sounds. Research from my alma mater confirms what the hippies were only just discovering back then — that a single dose of magic mushrooms will commonly turn into one of the most important mystical experiences of a person’s entire lifetime. Yes, it really is that easy, as even proponents of the psychedelic experience, like Aldous Huxley, were wont to celebrate. (Not to condemn, but to celebrate. Mysticism for the masses — Huxley wasn’t born in America, but he probably should have been. He sure knew a typically American turn of mind when he saw one.)

I’m not presumptuous enough to rule one way or the other on the sincerity of drug-induced mystical experiences. I’ll just say that in 1962, the vast majority of Americans were either unaware of them or unwilling to consider them legitimate. Now, however, we read of a noted author who had a mystical experience after dental surgery, and it’s not all that shocking to us. Some of us may even have had similar experiences in similar perfectly legal and socially approved settings, and we feel comfortable calling them mystical in a way that our grandparents certainly would not.

And Douthat again, almost as if to prove himself a conservative:

[It may be that] something important is being lost as well. By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

I have a hard time seeing anything other than snobbery here. America is a mass-produced society, the first and the most resolute of the type. You want full-time mystics? We do happen to have those by the dozens. You want a weekend — but only just a weekend — of mystical transport? Heck, we invented that trip.

I need to vent a little bit about the way the discussions under Jason’s post on markets and E.D.’s response have tended to move into debates about the merits of communism and capitalism, as if the question is whether markets can solve either all problems or none. I doubt that speaking about markets at this level of abstraction is very useful, but since we’re already doing it, I’ll toss in my opinion.

The reason that basically all large and lasting human cultures have made some space for markets (and formed black markets in the event that someone powerful tries to outlaw legal markets) is that when people trade with each other, the distribution of goods necessarily moves toward matching the map of preferences. This happens for a simple reason. If a proposed trade doesn’t alter the distribution of goods in a way that the parties to the trade prefer, then they won’t trade. In just the way that Jason described, market spaces take distributed information into account, and they’re extremely powerful and rather amazing.

So if markets work so well, why don’t we use them for everything?
[Read more →]

From TNR’s excellent review of The Killer Trail, a history of  one murderous French expedition into the heart of 19th century Africa (emphasis mine):

The Europeans, Taithe notes, never recognized African kingdoms as states, and never interpreted the Geneva Convention as applying to these colonial wars. “Against the uncivilized,” the historian writes, “‘no need to be civilized’ seemed to be the argument.”

And here’s Donald Rumsfeld (emphasis mine):

Rumsfeld replied that the Geneva Convention applies to all prisoners held in Iraq, but not to those held in Guantanamo Bay, where detainees captured in the global war on terror are held.

Any al-Qaeda or Taliban personnel taken prisoner are to be treated consistent with the Geneva Convention, under a decision made by Bush, Rumsfeld added.

He said the distinction is that the international rules govern wars between countries but not those involving groups such as al-Qaeda. “Terrorists don’t comply with the laws of war. They go around killing innocent civilians,” Rumsfeld added.

And John Yoo (emphasis mine):

Al Qaeda is not a nation-state, and its members–as they demonstrated so horrifically on Sept. 11, 2001–violate the very core principle of the laws of war by targeting innocent civilians for destruction. While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection under the conventions (since Afghanistan signed the treaties), they lost POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying the laws of war.

As a result, interrogations of detainees captured in the war on terrorism are not regulated under Geneva.

And Thomas Sowell (emphasis mine):

The argument is made that we must respect the Geneva convention because, otherwise, our own soldiers will be at risk of mistreatment when they become prisoners of war.

Does any sane adult believe that the cutthroats we are dealing with will respect the Geneva convention? Or that our extension of Geneva convention rights to them will be seen as anything other than another sign of weakness and confusion that will encourage them in their terrorism?

No one has suggested that we disregard the Geneva convention for people covered by the Geneva convention. The question is whether a lawless court shall seize the power to commit this nation to rules never agreed to by those whom the Constitution entrusted with the power to make international treaties.

I remain confident that there’s no possible connection between refusing to abide by the Geneva Conventions and subsequent human rights abuses.

Stephen Lee Myers in the New York Times:

Defying a sustained barrage of mortars and rockets in Baghdad and other cities, Iraqis went to the polls in strength on Sunday to choose a new Parliament meant to outlast the American military presence here.

Insurgents here vowed to disrupt the election, and the concerted wave of attacks — as many as 100 thunderous blasts in the capital alone starting just before the polls opened — did frighten voters away, but only initially.

The shrugging response of voters could signal a fundamental weakening of the insurgency’s potency. At least 38 people were killed in Baghdad. But by day’s end, turnout was higher than expected, and certainly higher than in the last parliamentary election in 2005, marred by a similar level of violence.

Overall, the election has looked like a real achievement–we’ll have to see how it plays out but it looks as if the results will be publicly accepted (given some likely back room dealing), the elections were generally free and fair, and the races fairly competitive.

All of which is to the good.  I wish the Iraqi people (after so many decades of horror), some bright spots going forward.

That said, this frame concerning the “fundamental weakening of the insurgency” either needs some serious contextualization or is flat out misleading.

Minus a real hardcore element (the so-called irreconcilables in COIN language), an insurgency uses violence to achieve political ends.  The Iraqi insurgency from the get go was dominated by Sunni Iraqis–particularly after the insurgency became the Iraqi Civil War (reaching a climactic moment at the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque).  This point was entirely missed in the US press during the time (and still today), which referred to said events primarily through the lens of an “insurgency”– but the Sunni were only fighting the US so long as the US was aligned with the Shia.

Once the Shia won the Civil War (2004-2007), the Sunni-dominated insurgency as such lost its rationale.  The Sunni insurgency was at that point bought off by the American government, i.e. during the so-called Anbar Awakening.  But the only real “awakening” was the dawning realization on the part of Sunni tribal sheiks that they would have to accept Shia dominance going forward and they might as well get the US to give them something in return for that recognition. [Read more →]

In my ‘wealth and moral character’ post, the discussion quickly turned to the Walmart debate, and whether Walmart was bad or good for local economies, communities, etc.  Let me first say that I understand the impulse to blame Walmart for many perceived ills in local communities.  Walmart is not an attractive place.  I am instinctively turned off by the aesthetic of the big box store.  Nevertheless, I am aware also that my aesthetic concerns can cloud my judgment, and that perhaps we should think more in terms of basic human welfare rather than purely aesthetic (big box vs. small mom and pop).  A few of the critiques of Walmart include:

• Walmart puts small businesses out of business.
• Walmart depresses wages.  Walmart employees are treated badly and paid badly.
• Walmart and other big box stores have an averse impact on communities both aesthetically and because they are big corporations.
• Walmart receives unfair advantages from government in zoning and tax treatment.

Let’s address each. 

#1)– there is an assumption that because a large, cheap retailer moves into a community it will drive all its small competitors out of business.  First of all – this is quite possibly very true.  That is why whenever one big-box retailer moves into an area, we should hope its followed by one or two more.  These competitors will keep the costs of goods at the other big box retailers low.  The reason that the mom and pop retailers are driven out of business by Walmart in the first place is that they can’t compete with both the lower cost of goods, but also the much wider availability of goods that Walmart (or Target, etc.) can provide.  Typically these mom and pop retailers were local monopolies in the first place, and had poor selections and high prices.  Walmart, Target, and other big businesses come in with a much better selection of goods and so consumers freely choose to shop there instead.

And voila!  Consumers now have more money in their pockets.  Poorer or working class people suddenly have cheaper clothing, furniture, medicine, and even groceries.  This means they have more money left over at the end of the day to spend on other goods.  Clever local business people can capitalize on this by starting up businesses that are not in direct competition with Walmart – like restaurants, bars, or novelty stores.  Indeed, the leftover money from cheaper goods can quickly translate into a more robust local business climate than ever before.  It results in a changed local economy, not in the death of a local economy altogether.  The cheaper retail goods (and books, if you want to include Amazon in this critique) and so forth lead to new services being available to consumers because these consumers have more money to spend on leisure, on massages or movie tickets, or nights out on the town.  In other words, this idea that Walmart destroys local business is simply not true.  It changes local business, but it certainly doesn’t destroy it.  Indeed, restaurant owners may find that they can purchase some of the food-goods cheaper from Walmart (or Sam’s Club, or Cosco) cheaper than ever before….

(As an example: Let’s say I have $50 to spend.  I need to buy some things for the house.  At the local retailer these items will cost me $35 leaving me with $15 to save or spend.  At Walmart they will cost $20 leaving me with $30 to save or spend.  If I buy the goods at Walmart I can then go spend $30 on other goods or services around town.  I can spend twice as much on going out to eat.  Hell I might even be able to do dinner and a movie.  If I’d bought the goods at the local retailer, I would certainly have been limited to dinner or a movie.)