sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with ethics of taking

I haven't thought for a while about the ethics of taking, but it's on my mind today. A couple of connected developments this week:

Zerlina Maxwell, a feminist writer, made the comment to Sean Hannity that maybe we should put more energy into telling men not to rape. Hannity retorts that such an approach is useless because "criminals won't listen." Since appearing on the show, Maxwell has faced a wave of death threats and other violent, angry responses.

A couple of high school football players are convicted of rape, setting off a wave of commentary in the media expressing sympathy for... those two poor rapists whose lives are now ruined. The survivor gets death threats; two girls were arrested just today for threatening to kill her. Her identity has of course been revealed by the press, despite guidelines meant to prevent this.

By now most of you have probably heard of "rape culture," which is what happens when you combine the "abuser planet" phenomenon with misogyny. Our cultural narrative inherently sides with the bully, with the abuser. They are the one whose lives and thoughts are clear to us, whose justifications we buy into without question. "Look what she drove me to do!" "She was asking for it." "She's responsible too." Say any of these things and people will nod knowingly. Say them and you automatically recruit at least half of all observers into co-conspirators. "She's just saying it for the sympathy" (only true if by "sympathy" you mean death threats).

The ethics of taking have something to say about this, and provide a counter-narrative. As I described it before, "this ethic would require us to consider what the costs are of taking anything that we feel free to take." Even if overtly offered, because offering is not always an act of free will. I originally applied it to resources, but it could just as easily apply to our relationships with other human beings.

A while back I commented on the connection between Empire and starvation: the Empire keeps us all starving because we are more pliant that way and less likely to look up from our struggles to apprehend the bigger picture.

This is the first thing I thought of when a friend on FB linked to this story:

With nearly 14 million unemployed workers in America, many have gotten so desperate that they're willing to work for free. While some businesses are wary of the legal risks and supervision such an arrangement might require, companies that have used free workers say it can pay off when done right.

"People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary, so they're going to outperform, they're going to try to please, they're going to be creative," says Kelly Fallis, chief executive of Remote Stylist, a Toronto and New York-based startup that provides Web-based interior design services. "From a cost savings perspective, to get something off the ground, it's huge. Especially if you're a small business."

In the last three years, Fallis has used about 50 unpaid interns for duties in marketing, editorial, advertising, sales, account management and public relations. She's convinced it's the wave of the future in human resources. "Ten years from now, this is going to be the norm," she says.

from Unpaid jobs: The new normal?

So, basically, we can expect more and more that companies will string people along without pay for as long as they're willing to go along with it, because they're disposable and replaceable and there's someone else starving and desperate waiting in line for the opportunity. They will hire just enough of these people to make it seem like other than a con.

Fortunately at present there are still laws protecting people from being used like this. Wanna bet that's going to change in the next two years?

Mark Morford has me thinking this morning about the pull of temptation. It is a very old moral dilemma; the defining dialectic of Christian (and perhaps Judeo-Christo-Islamic) society; the worldly vs. the pure, participation in the 'world' versus the path of virtue and holiness.

I do not see the world this way, though the culture around me does, and this creates a dissonance. For me, the dilemma is between privilege and lack, and the gap created by people who act with disregard to the ethics of taking. I've described this before, but put simply, my assertion is that we have an ethical obligation to consider the cost of taking something, even something that appears to be freely available to us or willingly offered.

Consider, for example, a couple where the female partner does more of the housework than the male partner. How does this common pattern come to be? In my experience when a man and woman live together as a couple they fall into this pattern without it ever being discussed. And all the while the woman's resentment builds slowly at the fact that she is doing more than her fair share around the house until it erupts into argument, at which point the man pleads innocence. "I never asked you to do all that," he might say. And it's probably true, on the face of it, that he did not specifically ask her to do everything she does.

The system of ethics we are taught in the United States tells us it is wrong to take what does not belong to us. However, it is okay without reservation to take what is due to us. And it is quite amazing when you contemplate it how much the average US citizen considers his or her due. Even better to take that which is offered to us or freely available.

In movies and on TV we see 'noble yet primitive' Indians giving thanks when they hunt and kill. There are so many things that could be said about this, but what is relevant to this post is that this strikes me as a relic of awareness that not all people have the same ethics of taking as we are taught in the US. There is in this the tacit admission that, well, yeah, it would probably be better to consider at least for a moment the animals we kill and eat, but, we've moved beyond such quaint spiritual values. We are a nation of 'the world.'

This brings me back to the point I was making at the outset: the dialectic between 'the worldly' and 'the virtuous.' Christian virtue is often presented as a package deal (you're either in or out, no in-between) and once a person has already decided they are not going to participate, then it becomes that much easier to dismiss the 'loftier' parts of it, especially in the absence of anyone to call them out. "You're a better person than me," someone might say, before shrugging and taking what is their 'due.'

When you say, "Don't take someone for granted," it is understood that this is generally a crappy thing to do. Or "Be respectful or considerate," it is understood that these are generally good things to do. But they are shunted off as virtue, as a detached abstract value that can be easily and safely shelved (though maybe with the occasional vague abstract sense of guilt about it), rather than considered as actual ethical obligations.

The difference between a spiritual virtue and an ethical obligation is that the latter does not go away because you decide not to adhere to a religious belief. Ethical obligations reflect the material consequences of actions, and the fact that humans are smart enough to see them in advance much of the time.

Behold the architecture of privilege.

It is privilege not to consider what something costs. Only that which has a price tag has cost, right? How very convenient it is that expenditure of effort, or even more invisibly, silent sacrifice, are not viewed as things of "cost," because there is no one to stick a monetary price tag on them. There are those who dismiss, with a smirk even, the hidden cost of performing tasks, because pain, fatigue, resentment, what are these, they are ephemeral, they are unseen, keep them unseen and give me my due.

So, going back to my example of the couple above, while the male partner may not have specifically asked his gf/wife to do more of the household stuff than he does, he also didn't object or say anything when she did. Since he materially benefited from it, he was by my perspective ethically obligated to consider what it means to accept the gift of her labor. We could get into things like, maybe her standards are higher than his, unreasonably high, etc., but this is an aside from the larger issue because this goes way beyond household chores. It concerns the conduct of humankind as a whole.

It goes to things like humankind eating a plentiful species into extinction, or strip mining whole mountain ranges, or dumping so much trash there's a continent of floating plastic in the ocean. This is not driven, organized evil; simply the collective result of a million decisions made by individuals with little or no thought given to the ethics of taking what can be taken. Just a few pesky nags like me complaining, and we are easily enough ignored. Whether or not we could have known, or even should have known, that such things can result from our collective decisions, we can't afford as a species to forever react in hindsight to consequences. We're smarter than that.

Mea culpa.

I was commenting to

cowgrrl the other day about how it seems like there aren't any major corporations that are in business to just simply make a product and sell it to people; they all have a business model that requires sticking it to customers in every inventive way possible. I couldn't actually think of an example (well, there's Ben & Jerry's, I suppose). But for just about every company I could think of, I can recall reading of ways in which those companies have done what they could to to stick it to their customers, competitors, and employees.

Is this 'just human nature'? "Caveat emptor" is clearly not a modern innovation; if anything, the paltry constraints of law and regulation to reign companies in and made them do at least roughly what they say they're going to do is the modern innovation. But are people born this way? Is this a side to human nature we just have to cope with? I've read that apes are born with an innate sense of fair play and know when they've been cheated, and people get a dopamine boost from doing good deeds. It seems more like cooperation and generosity are natural instincts, where deception and two-timing are learned behavior. So much for "that's just the way people are;" I don't believe that, and I think it's time for people to expect better from one another.

But then, Socrates argued in The Republic that the one who profits most is the unjust man who succeeds at convincing everyone else that he is ethical and upstanding. If this is true, than we can expect people with this ethic to be the most financially successful, and therefore to gravitate to the center of the business world, where they force everyone else to emulate their model just to compete. As justifications go, "we have to stay competitive" has the benefit of having some truth to it, if at the downside of being circular.

What companies are all afraid of is that if they were to unilaterally de-asshole-ify their business model, their costs would go up, causing their profits to drop, in turn causing stockholders to rebel and hire a new board of directors who will just turn around and re-asshole-ify the business model. What we more typically see is that businesses will partially de-asshole-ify their business model, sometimes under penalty of law, trumpeting this in ads as proof of their honesty and trustworthiness. A company like Wal-Mart, which we're used to thinking of as an evil behemoth, has the power to do great good simply by virtue of its influence by making a single decision, such as for example lowering the price on generic drugs they sell or declaring they will hold toy suppliers to a new standard.

Research on what would happen if every major company all around the world simultaneously de-asshole-ified their business models is scant. For one thing, academic economists refuse to admit the business world has an ethics problem. If they can claim they are within the law and playing by all regulations, what's the problem? (This leaves unasked the question of just who wrote those laws and regulations and what they allow.) Even those sorts of asshole business that are outside of the law are usually covered by plausible deniability ("Hey, we had no idea our suppliers had 7-year-old kids doing 13-hour shifts! We're innocent!"). And as the last resort, when the deception and exploitation can no longer be denied, we're told it's the only thing that makes the benefits of modern life affordable (if by "benefits" you mean cheaper products that wear out in 3 years instead of 20). But, really, how do we know that?

What we do know is that few of us would choose to live in a world with so much deception and exploitation if we had any real say in things. The human race will probably never live in a utopia of honesty where the asshole business model does not exist. But I do think it is possible to chip away at it, with coalitions (cooperatives and mutual aid societies) and with more & better ethics training starting in childhood (interfering with our society's tendency to sympathize with takers: bullies and winners-at-any-cost). If people are taught to be this way, they can taught to be another way.

ETA. I've speculated in the past on how neat it would be if we redefined the idea of "profit" to mean not just a positive difference between revenue and cost, but to reflect a socially holistic idea of utility. Maximizing profit in that scheme would mean maximizing not just one's own revenue while minimizing one's own costs, but also maximizing the social benefit while minimizing the social cost. A change in perspective along these lines would move us away from the asshole business model.

One of the reasons I haven't been posting as much over the last couple of years is a dawning awareness of the general futility of words.

I've also, as I was saying to R* last night, developed a strong aversion to being lectured by people 15-20 years younger than me. I want to just say, though it is bad form, "Do you think you are the first person to recite these ideas at me?" It's 'bad form' because ideas are supposed to be replied to with ideas. That's the 'free marketplace of ideas,' right?

But there's so little point to playing the idea game because words are so often nothing more than a verbal soundtrack people play while committing acts which may or may not bear any resemblance to the ideas they are promoting.

And, it is highly discouraging how few people seem capable of really grokking this point. Especially when it comes to politicians. There are a lot of words about how politicians are lying scumbags but people will always refuse to accept this about their favorite politician. I hate to break it to you, but yes, even your favorite politician is a lying selfish scumbag.

So, what does matter to me? Experiences and actions. Tell me what you've seen and experienced. Show me what you've done and what you are doing. Those are the things I can trust, and which have real impact on the world.

So, yes, i've seen it mentioned: "recession chic." It's stylish now to talk about how you're doing without some modern luxury that people had gotten used to. Cheaper clothing, cheaper vacations, keeping the car a year or so longer. More and more talking heads on TV telling us how morally satisfying it is when you save instead of consuming quite so conspicuously.

And while yes, Americans have badly needed to buy less crap than they can honestly afford, it feels like the mass media has decided now to sell the recession, just as when we had money and credit they sold us more crap than we could afford. They needed us then to be happy quiet content little consumer bots, and now they need us to be happy quiet content not-making-runs-on-the-bank bots.

It is interesting, though, how easy it is for the spell of marketing to unravel. It's like people are waking up to the realization, "Oh, hey, i don't need to have a new 4-in-one PDA/phone/GPS/MP3 player, the items i already have work just fine. Or, you know, i'll even go without, because somehow that's how i existed 10 years ago and i was just fine back then." It's like the echoes in the echo chamber are starting to die down and you can hear your own thoughts for once.

Once upon a time it was practically unpatriotic to suggest that people save a bit more and buy a bit less. Now we're hearing about the virtues of saving more and buying less, from the same people, pretty much. It's not that they can't make up their minds; it's that they care less about meaning than about what we need to hear to stay in line.

So, along comes "recession chic;" marketers selling us what we already have, which is a sudden decrease of abundance. It's to float us along until they get the echo chamber started again. We're roughing it! It's fun! It's an adventure! And doesn't it feel good to put money into savings instead of buying a piece of worthless crap? But soon the adventure will be over and we can go back to buying tons of useless crap on our credit cards again.

But if this goes on long enough, maybe the edifice will start to crack a bit. What do i mean? I mean this strange world order in which somehow many of us have jobs that do not relate even remotely to the core functions of survival: growing food, distributing food, making clothing, gathering resources, making tools, making shelters, maintaining shelters, curing illness, child care, teaching. Wait, what is all this other stuff we're doing? Well, some of it makes sense: research, development, energy, waste management; a lot of it doesn't.

If it goes on long enough, maybe more people won't be so eager to fall for low "introductory rates" on credit cards next time around. Maybe they won't so easily succumb to the allure of new gadgets.

Now is the perfect time to get the word out about how poisonous the flowers in this phony paradise really are. To make people aware, for example, that the sudden spike in demand for tantalum, which is used to make numerous electronic devices like the Playstation 2, incited a war in the Congo. People were dying and children were being enslaved in mines half a world away so that we can have a game machine, and most of us never even knew about it.

For me the question of cultural appropriation, especially when it comes to, "Where does the inter-cultural exchange of ideas stop and misappropriation begin?", is endlessly fascinating. The thing is, there isn't a monolithic answer to these questions, and we can't come up with an easy answer or template and just tack that on whenever the question arises.

How such an exchange, or misappropriation, occurs has to be seen in the historical context of how it came to be. As a jumping-off point, there's this interesting video of Jennifer 8 Lee talking about Chinese restaurants in America (seen in

debunkingwhite):

From the point of view of a merchant, trade between nations and cultures is a good thing -- because it means more potential buyers, more potential profit, more potential opportunities. So it may have seemed to restaurant owners or merchants in Chinatown when white folk started coming in greater and greater numbers to see what food or decorations they could buy that were unlike anything else they or their neighbors had.

And so i think the notion of cultural misappropriation feels to white people like a glass of cold water thrown in the face when a friend accuses them of it because they have a statue of Buddha sitting on their fireplace mantle. Well, hey, they might reply, i bought it in Chinatown from a woman who seemed happy to sell it to me; if *she* doesn't have a problem with it, why should *you*? Or, taking it a step further, doesn't it foster understanding if the people of different cultures who live side-by-side sell things to one another? It makes them less alien, and therefore less scary... doesn't it?

And on their own these are perfectly valid points, IF and only if you exclude the macropatterns of racism in our society. On the micro-level, it's not necessarily a huge deal; where it becomes a problem is when it's enough people in the privileged class who partake of the "exotic" that it starts to drown out the voices and living cultures of the minority.

What i've seen in the last couple of years is that awareness is starting to spread among white people that there's this thing called "cultural misappropriation" and if you're not conscientious you could be doing it too, and ZOMG i don't want to be an oppressor so how can i make sure i am not a cultural misappropriator?

It's gotten to where i've seen people say they're only comfortable with seeing white people exploring the religious traditions of their ancestors. Anything else is too close to cultural misappropriation. So, what, someone has to get a mitochondrial DNA test before they know what religions they are allowed to explore? And isn't this in its own way a restriction on people of color, in that it prevents them from potentially sharing their faith or beliefs with white people?

And yet, i don't mean to deny that cultural appropriation of religious ideas and imagery is very real, and very detrimental. Where it concerns me most is (1) when cultural motifs are reduced to "entertainment value" or "diversion" to the extent that their original meaning is obscured; when this happens, people of color can no longer express their own ideas or criticisms using those motifs without white people hearing "entertainment" when they encounter it; (2) when cultural motifs are stripped of any political implications, especially those which are critical or subversive towards the dominant paradigms; and (3) when people of privilege are turning a profit by stripping the meaning away from cultural motifs. The motif in question becomes an element of the larger culture, and the meaning the larger culture attaches to it drowns out the original meaning attached to it by the smaller culture.

In short, it is a part of the greater pattern of commodification and of misappropriating the language of dissent, the process by which meaningful utterances which pose any threat of causing people to question the authoritarian ideology are rendered harmless.

So, the question becomes, how can people of different cultures share ideas, motifs, food, relics, without them losing their meaning in the context of the original culture? The only way, ultimately, to share ideas in a truly free way is in a world free of hegemonic dominance... which is a tragedy, because humans have so much to share with one another.

If you haven't seen the Yahoo!/60 Minutes video segments on the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh, i recommend you do.

At one point in the series of segments, a commentator says something like, this is capitalism at its most raw and gritty. A beach drenched with dumped oil, chemicals, asbestos, debris, and who knows what else. A wealthy Bangladeshi buys the ships as-is from Western companies, who would otherwise have to pay expensive disposal costs in their own countries, and sails them right up onto the beach where laborers, many of them children, tear them down rivet by rivet. They have no training or protective gear and about 50 die every year in accidents; and goddess only knows how many more die from inhaling smoke and other chemical exposures.

But you know? It's too easy to blame capitalism. Yes, this particular instance is the result of a capitalist mechanism. But it's not as if we haven't seen environmental disasters and poor working conditions in socialist countries, either. No, the underlying mechanism here is racism, classism, and neo-colonialism, and the way to fix it lies in deeply re-examining our ethics of taking -- and in this case, our ethics of dumping.

So, the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie is out, and i'm... feeling really mixed and weird about this.

When "Raiders of the Lost Ark" came out, i was 11 and this was, like, the best movie evar! It had dungeons with bizzare traps, and bullwhips, and arabs swinging swords, and a staff which had to be put in the right slot at just the right time so the sun could shine through the gem and reveal where the treasure was!

In the 27 years since, we've had a lot of discourse about how destructive and misappropriative archaeology can be, culturally speaking. And the overriding principle of Indiana Jones's morality, that antiquities "belong in a museum" is, let's face it, the antithesis of how we should really be conducting discourse between cultures and examining the past. 27 years ago, this seemed an enlightened perspective because in a museum, as opposed to a private collection, an antiquity is more roundly accessible to academia and therefore to the advancement of "human" (by which was meant, Western) knowledge.

But, whereas antiquities appear to be the products of civilizations long gone and people dead for generations, their descendants live in the area, and their cultural identity is increasingly tied to those antiquities. Those items belong to the descendants of the people who made and used them, and our awareness is growing that it is wrong to take them away from the country where they were found and locked in a museum thousands of miles away, where they are examined in a scholarly way out of context.

The new model of handling antiquities is to leave them in the possession of the country where they are found, since the means to preserve them can be established there; and for scholars to go and study the objects in an environment closer to the cultural context in which they were produced.

I think, though, kidding aside (thanks for that,

_yggdrasil), that i trust Steven Spielberg not to glorify cultural misappropriation. Most of his films, particularly his later films, have shown a sensitivity to the ways and workings of oppression; not a perfect understanding, perhaps, but in general he does not take the side of the oppressor over the underdog.

In the second Indiana Jones movie, Jones gives the artifact in question (a sivalingam) back to the people to whom it belongs after taking it from the Thugs (literal Thugs) who appropriated it. To do so, he has to strain against his own instinct to take the artifact for himself; but we see this struggle, and his eventual understanding that the artifact belongs to the Indian people.

So i hope it is *this* Indiana Jones we see in the fourth film, and not the one who sees bringing a prize back to his museum in America as a victory. Because *that* Indiana Jones is as dated as the theme music.

Several years ago, Thay Hanh implanted a thought in my mind while i was reading one of his books (probably Living Buddha, Living Christ). It is one of those ideas that, once it sinks in and you apply it, can change your life.

In the Buddhist perspective, attachment is the source of sorrow, because when you get attached to things, you cannot easily adjust when things (as they do) change.

Anyway, Thay Hanh, on the ethics of long-term relationships, wrote that in his school of thought people are taught to treat their significant others as if they are honored houseguests.

The notable thing about the way we treat houseguests, is that we do not place any obligations on them, outside of the common obligations we have as human beings to be decent to one another. And not only that, but we give them a place of priority in our lives while at the same time reserving a sense of our own space.

It's such a very different way of viewing relationships from what we are taught in American society that i have had to turn this idea over in my head many times over the years since. More than any other thing i encountered in his writings, this thought stood out and grabbed my attention.

The underlying basis of this teaching is that fundamentally we choose how we treat people. In America (as, i guess, in many cultures) we often try to disguise the less savory things we do to one another by dressing them up in feelings. "I hit you because i got so angry i just couldn't help it." Well, point of fact, you can help it, because there are a lot of people you wouldn't hit no matter how angry you get, and if you can help it then, you can help it when you're around your partner.

I first read Thay Hanh's treatment of this subject at the time my marriage was ending, and it had a profound impact on the way i viewed the whole relationship, and what i wanted to do moving forward.

For one thing, i was profoundly disappointed in the way i had acted over the years. This is a recurring theme in my life, and it is a difficult part of endeavoring to be a better person: facing my missteps, especially where they have harmed people i care about; then finding a way to live with that, which begins with ensuring that i never do it again (whatever the harmful "it" happens to be).

But it also informed the way i felt i wanted to define my relationships moving forward. For one thing, i am not eager to blend my money, my personal space, my identity with another person ever again. My wife and i, for example, have separate bank accounts, separate bedrooms, separate beds, we don't know one another's passwords, and we like it that way.

The people i love are honored guests in my life. That means they are under no obligation to make themselves available for anything: not for sex, not for affection, not for household chores, not for letting me into their personal space, not for keeping things the way they are.

And as i write this, i am smarting from the pain of having to acknowledge how far outside of these ethics my actions have been recently. If i had been living by the full implications of this ethic, i would not have been caught off-guard when the emotional landscape of my life shifted as it did recently. And i write this not by way of apology, but by way of working things through thoroughly enough that i do not ever commit this wrong again.

What i have learned recently is that even if you approach a relationship from this perspective, it applies not only at the outset of the relationship but each and every moment anew. The emotional landscape of one's life is not permanent.

For someone who is polyamorous, that could mean for example when your significant other starts a new relationship, and suddenly is less available than they were before. They do not owe you the difference. Every bit of affection or attention one receives in a relationship is a gift freely offered, which can be withdrawn at any moment free of blame or guilt. In other words, it does not matter the reason why it is withdrawn. If/when a gift of this nature is withdrawn, one's response should be gratitude that it was given in the first place, not frustration that it has been withdrawn. Such a gift cannot be owned or expected, cannot be yoked with obligation - that road leads to abuse and mistreatment.

Note that one cannot avoid this dilemma by being monogamous, because partners can take up new passtimes or make new friends, and, similarly, they do not owe the difference in what energy they make available to their spouse.

The Gap has gone into full PR-damage control mode after it was revealed that one of their vendors was selling them clothing made by literal child slaves.

They have plausible deniability of course, because they buy from vendors who hired subcontractors to make their clothing. And they probably are actually appalled by the problem itself, not just by the criticism they're facing. They never told anyone to purchase children as slaves... they just gave their business to whoever could come up with clothing at the lowest price.

The Marxian term for the process at work here is commodity fetishism, which is a distortion in social priorities brought about by putting price tags on things. It's a distortion which blinkers us to the causal effects of our decision-making, the long-range or distant ethical ramifications of continuous cost-cutting and profit-maximization.

One aspect of this distortion is the devaluation, and subsequent discarding, of children.

In the agricultural and pastoral economy, children are a boon and blessing; in the urbanized economic model, they are (economically speaking) a burden. It is not a simple matter of children working on farms and ranches but not working in markets or factories - throughout most of history (including the present), children have occupied a place in the urban division of labor. No, the real issue is that in an urban economy people are separated from the wealth they create. They make things or perform services, for which they receive a wage which is not - which is never - equal to the average revenue product of their labor. What that means, in plain language, is that a person is never paid a wage equal to the value their labor creates.

That extra value is sucked up by the upper class. This is how it is that the gap between rich and poor tends to grow, and this is part of what i have, for two years now, referred to as slow-motion cannibalism.

Simply by virtue of existing in an urbanized society, an individual wage earner can statistically expect their net value to decrease over time. Some people manage to improve their lot; for every one who does, there are two or three who sink further into the whole. This is reflected in our financial life by perpetual debt; unless one owns property and capital, one is in debt forever to landlords and to banks. And to a poor family which has little of worth to give a child upon their birth, a child is an economic drain from the instant she or he is born.

It is a drain that people are willing to bear because of love. But being in debt makes you vulnerable. And a family that starts out with a margin of zero is on very thin ice indeed. Any kind of mishap - an illness, a drought, an inopportune death, and suddenly the unthinkable becomes the inevitable.

There are certain realities that are not altered by economic or political philosophy, and one of these realities is that the survival and caretaking of an individual human child represents a tremendous investment, of time, energy... even of love.

However, because of the way commodity fetishism works, this investment is not recognized as such. It is not recognized as an undertaking which creates value, even though it does. Viewed through dollar-sign-colored-glasses, the investment of raising a child is invisible, contrasted with the investment of buying a new piece of factory equipment.

When bankers run into problems, other capitalists and the government rush to prop them up. But when parents run into problems, they are on their own, a problem exacerbated by the urban breakdown of the extended family. On their own, with no prospects of aid or rescue, a desperate family will turn to horrific measures to survive - selling a child into slavery, or prostituting them, or killing them.

As an alternate vision, imagine a society that does recognize and give value to the investment of child-raising. Imagine a society where parents who run into difficulty are able to draw upon assistance based on the capital of their investment in the future. This would have to be a society where people ask, "How does this benefit us?" instead of, "How does this benefit me?"

We are only a state of mind away from it.

Boston's Big Dig. The NYC steam pipes. And now a freaking highway bridge in Minneapolis.

Forget terrorists. I'm afraid of our crumbling infrastructure. Each of us is far more likely to be killed by collapsing bridges, falling ceiling panels, or exploding steam pipes than any terrorist.

Let's go further back and include the Katrina response in this, because it, too, reflects a similar lack of focus.

And, let's expand outwards and include ethylene glycol in toothpaste and melamine in pet food. Because all of these things are connected by a central theme... which is, ironically, the lack of anything resembling a common focus or vision.

We don't have any kind of meaningful common focus in our decision-making as a society. So many of the quandaries we're in -- from global warming to the oceans dying to resource depletion -- happen because millions of developers, politicians, investors, and laborers are each doing our own thing, with little or no regard to anything resembling a big picture.

We're winging it, and we can't do that anymore. Luck runs out.

Part of this problem has been described in economic discourse as the Tragedy of the Commons. But beyond the obvious difficulties of overuse and depletion, these problems are a tangible result of the dearth of meaningful discourse regarding economic problems and solutions.

Politics has become an advertising-driven enterprise. Campaign consultants talk about their candidate's image as a "branding" concern, and they judge the success of their efforts by what kind of emotions people have when they think of their client. They focus-group test sound-bites and slogans and key phrases which are designed to worm their way into your brain and install an emotional pushbutton so you respond the proper way when they press it. Meaning is driven from the process because meaning is unpredictable. If any candidate comes along who says something really meaningful, it could throw the whole scheme off, and everyone's jobs in the campaign-industrial complex would be threatened. The consultants, whose job it is to win elections, not solve society's problems, distrust meaning. And the media, of course, plays right along, encouraging this trend and helpfully marginalizing any candidate who threatens to bring in too much meaningful discussion. Because for them, too, meaning is dangerous.

This sounds like an abstract problem, but it isn't because people are dying as a result of this, and those of us who haven't been killed by it are seeing our quality of life be affected.

"Boring" things like routine maintenance and food inspections and disaster preparation -- you know, the stuff that should be a no-brainer -- gets de-funded and de-prioritized because it's easier to get a photo op standing in front of something new, bigger, shinier. The result is mile after mile after mile of empty shopping centers, brownfields, urban blight, crappy schools, decaying neighborhoods.

This isn't a call for a political solution, BTW. This problem can develop in a Communist nation (cf. Chernobyl) just as easily as it can happen in a capitalist nation. The real issue is lack of involvement. Lack of discourse. Lack of contemplation and consideration.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

Last week i wrote about an issue close to my heart - the crisis facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

But i only told half the story, and left out perhaps the most important part; the part which is more difficult to talk about because it is shrouded in secrecy. That half of the story is this: who it is that actually commits the violence.

We know who the survivors are, by their scars, by their determination to move on, by their lives in the perpetual spotlight of being marked as Other. But so little is ever said about the ones committing the violence. We hear about who is assaulted and think we know all we need to know about the perpetrator. A woman was attacked? Probably done by a man. A gay man was attacked and peppered with slurs? Probably done by a straight person.

But this is far from the whole story, because most men have never attacked anyone, and most straight people have never attacked someone queer. What do we know about those who actually commit acts of violence or harassment, and why do they do it?

It was very easy to research the entry i wrote about the prevalence of homophobic and transphobic violence, exploitation, and harassment. But it is very difficult to find any information on the web about why people commit violence. I may have to actually — oh the horror! — go to a brick-and-mortar library for any answers.

Some time spent this weekend searching for a first-hand account of what was going through someone’s mind when they assaulted someone was fruitless. It’s possible that many perps even block this from their own conscious mind. Or its possible that the simplest reason of all applies — they did it because, straight up, they wanted to, and figured the relatively small risk of official sanction was worth it.

Psychologist Karl Jung claimed that we attribute our “undesirable” feelings and motivations to a part of our mind he called the Shadow, so that we can mentally detach ourselves from them and pretend they are not a part of us. Many people still attribute these feelings and motivations to the Devil. A while back i wrote in my LJ about the othering of perpetrators; it’s likely that many perps do this even to themselves in their own mind. “It was like someone else doing it through me,” or “i don’t really know why i did that, it’s not like me.”

That may account for the lack of personal accounts of committing violence; but it still doesn’t address the question of what is going through someone’s mind before they do it.

Criminal science and criminal psychology seem to mostly deal with finding out who has committed crimes. Even profiling does not seem to deal so much with what leads people to attack as it does with identifying characteristics which are likely to distinguish those who commit attacks. A criminal profile parses people into a list of things to look for, bits of demographic information and pieces of behavior, the kind of analysis that erases whole people from direct attention.

Google “criminal psychology” and mostly what you see are accounts of unusually heinous criminals: serial killers, sadistic kidnappers, that sort of thing. Not much on run-of-the-mill attacks like insulting and intimidating the queer kid every time you find him near his locker.

Serial killers appear to lack the part of the brain, which the rest of us have, which makes it possible to empathize with other people. So, they cannot conceive of the “thing” they subject to torture and murder as a conscious person who sees and feels the way they do.

But unless we’re prepared to believe that a fifth to a fourth of the population is psychotic and lacks the most basic ability to empathize, we need a better answer to why so many people set aside their empathy and lash out when they see the queer kid at his locker.

ETA. Even appeals to neuro-psychology are incomplete and unsatisfying. Why should lack of empathy lead to sadism? It does not logically follow that a missing or disordered part of the brain should lead to thoughts and actions being added. And why should the drives and desires which appear be those of aggression? Despite the stereotype of the ‘crazy person,’ people who are neuro-atypical tend to be in much more danger from others than they themselves represent.

The lack of satisfactory explanation is what drives feminists to conclude that acts of violence are primarily acts of will, driven by opportunity (”i can do that and get away with it”) and entitlement (”i have the right to do what i want, no matter who is put out in the process”); and furthermore, that they reflect a prevailing paradigm of silent, unspoken encouragement to violence against the out-class.

A conservative beat a socialist in the election in France, and many are using this as an opportunity to declare socialism dead in Europe.

The reality is much more complex than that. The last hurrah of state socialism notwithstanding, what is actually happening is a revolution within the revolution, which is precisely as it needs to be.

It's fair to say that a century of experiments have demonstrated that top-down, state-imposed socialism doesn't work. Economies and societies are too complex to be run from the top. Bureaucracies are too slow, too entrenched, to react to changing conditions. And we have seen, to our great disappointment, that there is no edifice we can establish as one generation's solution that cannot be undermined by unscrupulous cronyism and mutate into the next generation's problem.

But, at the heart of the problem is this: it is just not feasible in the long run to achieve the central goal of socialism within the state aparatus. There are some things, like accountability for wrongdoers, which will probably always require government. But the heart of socialism -- unraveling the web of control so we can be free -- is only hindered thereby.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in the middle and late nineteenth century, envisioned the global scheme of exploitation inevitably hitting a kind of rock bottom, causing ire among the working class to conflate to the point of violent revolution. They could not have foreseen the effects of technology between then and now; the effectiveness of advertising and television in numbing people to the inhumanly cannibalistic nature of the global economy -- nor could they have foreseen the widespread consciousness-raising potential of the internet.

They also imagined that the state could be transformed into an instrument for carrying out the will of the people. They were no doubt influenced by the grandiosity of American and French Revolutionary language -- the proclamation of "we the people" as the granter of governmental authority "by consent of the governed" (implying that consent can be withdrawn) instead of brute force and coersion and fear. That's a wonderful theory but it never seems to work out in reality.

At the other end of it, it is not enough to brew up a new critical rhetoric, bash a wine bottle on the bow and send it off into the world. Time has demonstrated that there is no rhetoric which cannot be misappropriated. Revolutions of this sort really only have to be waited out. A while back i proposed the (admittedly not very catchy) term "hypostatic reverie" to refer to the conceptual apathy by which people, over generational time scales, forget the 'revolutionary' character of new institutions and ideologies, and accept them as part of the landscape. And with this apathy comes the opportunity for misappropriation.

In terms of class struggles, it's been a very educational 140 years. We've learned, foremost, that we can't take the easy way out when unraveling the control paradigm. There is no single route to undoing the ideological and institutional hold of sexism, classism, and racism on society. It can't be imposed from the top; it can't be achieved in an adversarial-style uprising. If it were that easy, it could have been accomplished by now. The control paradigm operates on every level; it is embedded in our brains, implanted during childhood and, figuratively if not literally, beaten into us by parents, peers, and adults in authority.

Views become entrenched, even within the revolution; and "the revolution" has become such a fixture that it now is itself an edifice against which people of conscience must struggle. "The revolution" has been misappropriated so that it now is just another cog in the great machine of violence that chews people up. It is only with hindsight that we can comprehend that the monster often takes the guise of two factions, espousing different ideology, who grind away at each other, with children and women in the crossfire paying the highest price.

The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle reflects this shift in awareness -- acknowledgment of the need for those with socialist consciousness to greatly re-think the unraveling of control and domination.

The revolution has been changing. It has taken the form of an emphasis on individual efficacy, a fondness for observing with Gandhi that we should "be the change," to recognize one's own place in the pyramid of control and understand that actions carry repercussions.

For example, once you become aware of "fair trade" products, you are directly confronted with the reality of exploitation overseas. You are also confronted with the understanding that if you continue to buy products you can no longer pretend you don't know were made in sweatshops or by slaves, that no matter what political positions you espouse you are a cog in the machine.

It may be, because of limited income or family size, that you have no choice but to continue to buy the cheaper product -- which in itself bears interesting insights about the way the game works, the way we are all swept along with the tide and, scrabbling for our own individual survival, rarely take the time and energy to see the greater pattern.

That fair trade products cost more reflects to a degree the economies of scale, but also the reality that what makes many products affordable is wage exploitation, low labor and safety standards, and even slavery. The difference represents the degree to which it is profitable to have a global empire which does not care about oppression.

But this is the level on which the revolution needs to happen -- not "us versus them" antagonism, but waves of lightbulbs lighting up in individuals on every level of the pyramid. If you're reading this, you're probably pretty close to the top of the pyramid, like me. The closer we are to the top, the more effect our individual choices can have as they propagate down the line. As each of us makes more and more humane choices, this change progresses until it becomes a building wave, a ripple which sweeps across the world.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to put a price tag on something.

It works like this: if you have the money to buy it, whatever "it" is, then you can claim ownership of it. It seems a more civilized way of acquiring things than stealing them or taking them by force. There is also the illusion of egalitarianism (assuming you don't have laws prohibiting women or people of color from buying land in wealthy suburbs) in the unspoken assertion that every person's $1 bill has the exact same worth.

But you're not required to ask whether anyone was harmed in the making of it. You're not required to ask whether the animals invovled were treated humanely. You're not required to wonder whether the purchasing of mass-produced items is ecologically sustainable. As far as you know, the blouse you buy for $14.99 at WalMart came into existence on the clothing rack; and so, as far as you know, purchasing that blouse is not in any way a political decision or an action in support of child labor or animal cruelty.

There was nothing in human tradition to prepare us for the industrial age because throughout most of human history, we knew who made the objects we're buying. We didn't have to inquire about cruelty or sustainability because we could see for ourselves the conditions under which things were produced.

This privilege turns around and comes behind us as an obligation. In general we don't have time to make our own clothes and barely enough time to make our own food. Many of us, increasing numbers of us, have little choice about buying the inexpensive blouse at WalMart because it's the only way our children will have something to wear. We don't have any way of asking whether children or animals were harmed halfway across the world to make it because our attention is consumed with keeping ourselves afloat.

Many of us do not have the property and resources to be self-sufficient, either as individuals or as a community -- i've seen varying estimates on whether such a thing is even possible with the world population at 7 billion and rising. If you do not own your own plot of land, you are at the mercy of the social economy.

The price tag creates an illusion that one's ethical duty in a given transaction begins and ends with spending money for something -- that if you have $750,000 to spend on a diamond-encrusted Sit-n-Spin for your child, that you have the right to spend it and give no further thought to the ethical or social ramifications of your purchase.

In saying that, i don't mean to imply that no one has the right to spend money frivolously -- i mean to point out that our concept of money makes it easier to mask any unethical implications of one's actions. The primary ethical ramifications of our purchases are likely to be collective, by which i mean, the combined effect of decisions made by lots of people. (To flip that over, bringing an end to a particular kind of unethical pattern will mean many seemingly small choices by millions of individuals.)

I studied a lot of economics in college. My minor was officially in "social science" but in my junior and senior year all of the social science i took was economics. Economics is defined as the study of human decision making regarding limited resources. They say this, and then you spend all of your time talking about theoretical conditions which bear varying degrees of resemblance to the real world.

It is only with hindsight, and experience, and conscious exertion, that i am able to see the depth and meaning of what was left unsaid in all of those lessons. I am also able to see this now because it is the same thing left unsaid in virtually all of our culture's discourse.

We are still leaving these things unsaid in economics classes 150 years after Marx tried to raise the subject. The academic field of economics is in collective denial, and this denial reflects in policy recommendations by economists which lead to the perpetuation of suffering.

Why, for example, do economists never speak about the fact that many people use violence, intimidation, and discrimination to get more resources? This is, after all, human behavior in response to resource scarcity, no? So by all rights it should be relevant. Also left unsaid is any insight into how our attitudes towards a thing change when we place a price tag on it. This too is human behavior in response to resource scarcity, and it affects the course of the economy and the shape of human society and even the pursuit of justice.

These matters are deemed irrelevant, or perhaps it is said that we can come back to those matters as soon as "the model has been developed." The model assumes rational behavior. The model assumes human equality, perfect information, a "level playing field."

Such a model, of course, has no room for violence or discrimination -- and no room for these things to even be tacked on as an afterthought, as a mathematical modifier, because the ubiquity of violence, discrimination, and injustice brings reality too far from from the abstract model.

It's like trying to represent a fractal with line segments; you might learn a little about the shape, but in the process you lose too much of the important detail of the shape's character to understand it.

Perhaps graduate-level economics is different, but somehow i doubt it; most discussion i see about graduate-level economics is mathematical, building on the "supply and demand curves" model. I've seen a few things here and there about "behavioral finance" or "neuroeconomics" but these fields seem to have the same blinkers to violence and oppression (or, even worse, are rooted in awareness of these things with the goal of using them to individual advantage, thereby perpetuating them).

For anyone who may think i'm demanding or asking too much in my last post (and i strongly suspect many more feel that way than will say so), i think perhaps that you do not understand the crushing burdens and impositions on my life that i am expected to quietly withstand.

As a transsexual and queer person, i am expected to accept quietly and politely the constant fear of what people will say or do when they find out 'the truth' about me, the increased likelihood of being physically assaulted, the increased likelihood of being emotionally abused, the increased likelihood of being evicted or fired, the certainty of social ostracism, the certainty of losing friendships and family relationships. I do not have to do anything but exist in order to hear religious institutions call me immoral, disgusting, a threat to public decency, to hear medical institutions classify me as diseased and disordered, to hear 'experts' pontificate about me, to hear state and legal institutions refuse to accept or acknowledge my identity or the validity of my relationships, to hear politicians and preachers make speeches putting me down every day, to hear employers and universities and other businesses seek to exlude me. I do not have to do anything but exist to be laughed at, taunted, beaten up, raped, murdered. I am expected to hide who i am in society at large, deny it, nod politely when i'm called sinful or disordered. I am considered out of line or 'uppity' to even question this and ask for the same sort of treatment that others expect as a matter of course. If i complain with any degree of articulation, if i do anything that resembles pointing a finger at someone, i am told i am just as bad as those who have oppressed me.

These impositions are a tremendous drain on my energy, my time, my spirit, my income. They cast a shadow which i will never, ever escape over my emotional health, my relationships, my employment. This is the restriction i live with, it is my reality.

I am not alone in this burden, of course. Women feel it too, people of color, people with disabilities, neuro-atypical people, poor people. They can tell you about similar burdens, that they are expected to shoulder quietly.

What i have asked -- for people to inspect their lives and consider how they may have benefitted unduly at someone else's expense -- is the merest sliver of a trifle compared to the burden of oppression.

To what extent are we accountable to society for our decisions and actions? This is a question i've been wrestling with.

At the outset, i'm inclined to say we are not accountable at all. At heart i am an individual with free will, and not only is it my right but it is my duty to act in accord with my will.

Well, save that i shouldn't hurt anybody or steal from them and stuff like that.

However, accepting that kind of ethics means that to some extent i *do* feel accountable to society.

Suppose then i accept the bounds of not doing unto someone what i don't want done to me. (And i don't want to hear the 'what if you're a masochist' canard, because as a masochist i do not want to be hurt or harmed nonconsentually, and that is exactly how i plan to treat others.) Is that good enough? Can i do whatever i want, so long as i'm not harming anybody?

Well, the first difficulty there is what constitutes harm. Suppose i never harm a hair on anyone's head, but i am a slumlord and operate a sweatshop. Suppose i never harm a hair on anyone's head, and do not employ anyone exploitatively, but i *do* buy things which were made in a sweatshop. Where does accountability stop? Does it stop with knowledge and awareness?

But that is not the real difficulty. The problem i'm really wrestling with comes from the idea of entitlement.

Suppose someone offers me something, time, money, a gift, a favor, whatever. The offer comes at some expense to themself. Am i obligated to consider the cost to them before i accept the gift? Before you answer, factor in the reality that an offer may not be made as freely as it seems to be.

My first thoughts about this stem from the discussions we had last month about Silverstein's book The Giving Tree. I tried to imagine how we could express that the boy was acting unethically in accepting the tree's later offers, the offers that led to the tree's own diminishment. The answer i came up with reinforced the utilitarian ethic i've been playing with: the maximization of personal empowerment.

The way it cashes out, this ethic would require us to consider what the costs are of taking anything that we feel free to take.

It is an ethical restriction that many people will find naturally revolting. It flies directly in the face of the American way, which is to assume that any profit we can imagine is ours for the taking, that any frontier we want to cross is ours for the crossing, that any countryside we want to drive our SUV through is ours for the driving through.

It flies directly in the face of capitalist and libertarian ways of thinking.

It flies directly in the face of male privilege, too. What i have found is that many men accept the benefits of women's collective sacrifices without even being aware that the sacrifices are made. Then they wonder why women become so resentful of them. If however every man had to consider the cost to a woman in his life of the chores she does for him, for example, we come a step closer to breaking the cycles of male privilege.

It requires us to accept a burden that many of us have been trained to avoid taking, and yet, unless we take it on, we continue to benefit from awareness-censored layers of privilege.

In response to my post this morning about Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree,

bifemmefatale and

legolastn pointed me towards this page with a variety of different interpretations. The first author mirrored my comments about the book as a satirical commentary on anthropocentrism and male privilege. The second gave the "mainstream" interpretation of the book as an ode to motherhood, to selfless giving and to unconditional love.

Then about a third of the way down, there's this:

On a philosophical level we can use the relationship of the tree and the boy as a way to remind ourselves of the very different judgments produced by utilitarian and deontological ethical systems. Judged by the results of her actions, the tree is culpable before the bar of utilitarian judgment because she produced a spoiled little snot. Judged by her motives, however, the tree remains deontologically pristine.

In talking about ethics before i've mentioned the distinction between utilitarian and deontological ethics.

From the respective Wikipedia articles:
Deontology posits the existence of a priori moral obligations; it suggests that people ought to live by a set of permanently defined principles that do not change merely as a result of a change in circumstances.
Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics based on quantitative maximization of some good for a population.

In the past i've made it clear that i fall strongly on the utilitarian side; in fact i implied this quite recently when i defined the common political good to be maximized as personal empowerment.

From this perspective the tree's giving crosses over into the realm of unhealthy when she offers to let the boy chop off her branches. Without her branches, she is no longer an individual, able to flourish; her personal empowerment has become hobbled.

But let me take a different tack than the view i quoted above. I do not believe the tree is culpable, as Rabbi Gellman wrote. There's a common perception that exploitation within a relationship is a problem for which both participants are equally culpable. The person who is being used is nowadays called an "enabler," never mind that frequently her (most commonly) free will has been weakened and co-opted by emotional or physical abuse. From my perspective, "enabling" is more properly referred to as "survival."

Think: who is served by the idea of "enabling abuse"? This whole idea is an apologetic favoring the perpetuation of privilege. It allows the privileged to say, "But i'm a victim too! She let me take whatever i wanted, and never even tried to stop me!"

However, the Rabbi is right that the situation is "deontologically pristine." Many of our traditions about unconditional love promote selflessness, with the expectation that it will be mutual. But even when it is not mutual, it is something that is still praised, still asked and expected of us (especially, oddly enough, if we are female). Deontology makes moral absolutism possible; and moral absolutism is the root cause of ideological divisiveness.

The Rabbi continues,

In the end I am convinced that the tree was a well-meaning but foolish giver, and yet I am strangely in awe of that foolishness- perhaps because it is so Buddha-like, so profoundly indifferent to the demands of keeping and protecting assets in this selfish and wounded world. The Buddhists call this virtue tanhakaya and they mean by it the release from attachment to the things of the world. It is the third of the four-fold noble truth that stands at the heart of Buddhist dharma. The cause of suffering is attachment, and its cure is release, a simultaneous release from both the world and all need. In that final liberation-perhaps come to sitting upon the tree stump- both the tree and the man are free.

The tree is not an example of someone who is "released from attachment." This interpretation is an example of what i've said before about the development of religious doctrine as a cultural misappropriation of radical mysticism by the upper classes, whereby the apologists of privilege promote the idea of "spirituality," which is radical mysticism safely divested of its threat to the status quo and turned into a sanitized diversion to keep the masses in their place. Do the rich get and stay that way because of their unconditional love and their release from attachment? But with a sanitized version of "spirituality" at hand, even the rich can appear to be pious and righteous, even while beggars starve to death on their doorsteps.

Current Music: Dead Can Dance "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove"

In a locked post, i had a conversation yesterday about Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree. Say what you want about this book, it arouses some powerful emotions and strong reactions. This book depicts a tree who loves a boy so much, the tree gives up everything it has to suit the boy's needs, whims, and wishes. There is nothing to show that the boy recognized the depth of the tree's sacrifices or was even grateful; there is nothing to show that he considered the cost to the tree of accepting its sacrifices; he just took what was offered.

There's a part of me that has never quite forgiven Silverstein for writing this book; it cut me deeply.

It boggles me that there are people who think that this book straight-up encourages "the joy of giving". Others see in it a glorification of motherhood. I disagree most profusely with that kind of interpretation; i see the work as satire and cannot believe that Silverstein wanted us to see the relationship between the tree and the boy as a positive thing.

If i had to guess at Silverstein's purpose, i'd say he was making a statement about human misuse of the ecosphere -- about the sense of entitlement to take what humans deem to be freely (even lovingly) offered by nature. It occurred to me yesterday that the book could also be said to depict male privilege, the kind of privilege and entitlement that men are encouraged to think is a natural part of the way the world works and which actually involves a great deal of conscious sacrifice on the part of women, sacrifice that goes largely unacknowledged.

But none of the wrongness of this is explicitly acknowledged in the book, which makes it entirely feasible that Silverstein was comfortable and okay with the status quo. I don't personally think so, but i coud well be wrong. But then, that's the danger when you make a work of satire and don't put a disclaimer on it; you run the risk of being misunderstood, especially when your satire is particularly subtle.

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with ethics of taking

rape and the ethics of taking

yet another glimpse into how empires feed on starvation

how convenient that 'virtue' can be ignored

the grabbing hands grab all they can

some words on the general futility of words

recession chic

cultural appropriation, part googleplex of infinity

(no subject)

indiana jones and the spectre of misappropriation

the impermanence of the emotional landscape

it's all about the way we define our society's priorities

tyranny of the quantitative

visible victims, invisible perps

the revolution within the revolution

(no subject)

saying the unspeakable

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social accountability vs. privilege-entitlement

"enabling," deontological ethics, and "spirituality" as apology for privilege

the giving tree

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December 2021

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