After the Future

Capitalism at Its Worst

If you want to understand why socialism is likely to make a comeback, read the NYT story this morning about how Covidien, a large medical equipment supplier, bought up Newport Medical Instruments, a smaller medical equipment manufacturer, that had a contract with the US govt.beginning in 2010 to build inexpensive ventilators. Newport was making good progress, but apparently that did not please its larger competitor. Covidien bought Newport in order to stop the production of these cheaper ventilators because they would undercut the profitability of its existing ventilator that sold at a much higher price. 

Covidien—a publicly traded company with sales of $12 billion that year—already sold traditional ventilators, but that was only a small part of its multifaceted businesses. In 2012 alone, Covidien bought five other medical device companies, in addition to Newport.

Newport executives and government officials working on the ventilator contract said they immediately noticed a change when Covidien took over. Developing inexpensive portable ventilators no longer seemed like a top priority.

Newport applied in June 2012 for clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to market the device, but two former federal officials said Covidien had demanded additional funding and a higher sales price for the ventilators. The government gave the company an additional $1.4 million, a drop in the bucket for a company Covidien’s size.

Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business.

Some Newport executives who worked on the project were reassigned to other roles. Others decided to leave the company.

“Up until the time the company sold, I was really happy and excited about the project,” said Hong-Lin Du, Newport’s president at the time of its sale. “Then I was assigned to a different job.”

In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.

The government agreed to cancel the contract.

I'm sure Covidien has some b.s. reason why the project wasn't working out, and I"m sure they will blame the government. And I'm sure the government was faced with whether it wanted to get involved in years of expensive litigation with Covidien that would do little to produce ventilators at a price point that Covidien made clear it didn't want to make.

And I'm sure Wall Street thought it was the right thing for Covidien to do. It would have been capitalistic malpractice for Covidien to do otherwise. 

And then we wonder why the cost of healthcare is so ridiculously expensive in this country. Capitalism, insofar as it is driven primarily by the logic of highest returns for the investor, is the cause of higher prices, not a solution for them.

 

The Difference between Faith and Idolatry

This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.

Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as “pansies” and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church “when the rapture is taking place.” In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”

Katherine Stewart, NYT 3/27/20

I want to qualify some of the things that I said about the delusional thinking of Trump-supporting evangelicals in my last post. I don't back away from the assertion; I just want to explain why I think it's a fair judgment. The fact is that I find myself annoyed with the tone of the writer quoted above. It's not that she's wrong; it's just that it's another example of someone smugly preaching to the choir in the New York Times. And I can understand why someone might think that much of what I write shares in that smugness, and to some extent I'm guilty of that. So I want to add a little nuance. 

Reality on an ontological level is structured on the tension between opposites. Every great religion and philosophy understands this. The great challenge for humans both as individuals and as a society is to find a way to live with those tensions and to resolve them in ways that lead to greater levels of integration, which is what the spiritually mature do and have always done, especially the great saints. It isn't done very much in late modern societies for complex reasons, but mostly because it's a forgotten art. Rather than balance, a certain extremism is admired because it mimics vitality. So fanaticism is not an indicator of holiness; it is a parodic mimicry of it. Stewart, in the article quoted from above, is describing a kind of fanatical religiosity that is an unbalanced parody of faith, and it's important to understand what the criteria are for making such a judgment, because otherwise genuine faith suffers condemnation from guilt by association. 

Most people don't like tension, so they seek to avoid it by choosing one side or the other, which leads to seeing the side not chosen as the enemy or as evil. If a balanced human life requires living in the tension, for instance, between being an angel and a beast, there's a very strong temptation to go all in on angel or all in on beast, and when one does so, he sees the beast as the evil enemy or the angel as one. The naive Christianity portrayed in the quote above goes hand in hand with the naive scientism that sees humans as nothing more than talking animals. The first is a naive angelism, and the second a naive bestialism.

The first naively believes that his faith will protect him from the virus; the second naively thinks that the virus is a proof that there is no God because how could God allow such a thing? The first may have had genuine spiritual experiences or intuitions--the gift aspect of genuine faith--but they curdle and sour if those intuitions, like seeds, don't take root and are actively cultivated in a healthy engagement with empirical life in the material world. The second understands with a remarkable sophistication the what and the how things work of empirical reality on earth, but offers nothing of real value beyond, "Whatever floats your boat," when it comes to the why and the how to live a meaningful, full human life within that reality.

The culture war that has riven American society is essentially between naive angels and naive beasts. When one goes all in for one or the other, there is a concomitant repression of the opposite in oneself, and, to use the Jungian concept of the Shadow, what is repressed within ourselves gets projected in its most negative way onto others. We'd rather not deal with that part of ourselves because to do so would introduce a complicating level of tension that is just plain uncomfortable. It's just much easier to be one or the other, rather than working to reconcile or integrate them, in other words, to become a mensch.

And so naive angels see naive beasts as the spawn of Satan, and naive beasts see naive angels as delusional yahoos. And the sad truth is that both are kinda right. Because to the degree that either represses the opposite within himself, he actually becomes the  caricature that the other sees. The projection has a verifying objective correlate. One becomes a caricature to the degree that he refuses to become who he really is, and that requires a reconciliation of the opposites within each of our souls. So if one feels that he is being unfairly caricatured, he might not understand that he actually deserves it. 

We are told that we should never caricature others because each individual is unique. I sympathize with the sentiment, but I would amend it to say that each of us is only potentially unique. Our uniqueness--our menschiness-- is not a given, it is a potential that must be realized, and very few people have achieved much in this regard. So for most their menschiness lies dormant, and what we encounter instead are people who are not in actuality unique individuals but purveyors of group think. People often think they are speaking for themselves when they are not. They are just saying or thinking what their group says or thinks.

We refuse the challenge to become most deeply who we are to the degree that we naively surrender to the tribe, to ideology, to any kind of group think. Many academics I know who think of themselves as critical thinkers are ruled by a group think that is not that different in kind from the group think that shapes anti-science evangelicals. What passes for critical thinking is just applying a formula--whether it's deconstruction or scientistic skepticism. It's not that what either group knows or affirms isn't at least partially true; it's that they each feel compelled to reject or repress what the other affirms. And these repressions lead to demonizing projections referenced above. The only solution is to own one's projections. That's a beginning anyway. The rest is a difficult path of discernment and action that if successful leads toward integration and the realization of who we truly are. Otherwise we remain stuck. 

We are social creatures, so we must live within a culture, and that requires that we operate within a particular social imaginary, and the social imaginary is mostly about what the group thinks. So the development of our uniqueness therefore is always shaped by culture, but culture, despite what some of the postmodernists say, is not a closed system. The vastness of Being extends beyond what any culture can embrace, and the great prophets, artists, philosophers find a way to be open to what lies beyond a culture's bounds, and then to bring it back to the culture so that it might evolve.

The tension between our need to be individuals and our need to belong is just another example of a fundamental, ontological tension that we must live with, and is a good example of how when lived in the right way works creatively. If we have any spirit at all, we long to become unique, free, autonomous selves, but that autonomy is not possible unless it grows within and serves a larger social matrix. Our individuality must necessarily emerge from a group and remain in relationship with it in some creative, productive way.

That tension between belonging and autonomy never goes away, but even so there's the temptation to go all in on one or the other--to submerge oneself in the group or to fetishize our uniqueness in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with what truly makes us so. Being unique has little to do with your tats or your nose ring. Such behaviors are mostly parodies of individuality; they are in fact, just swapping one group for another. Such a step might be important in the longer arc of becoming a uniquely oneself, but it does not by itself achieve that, especially if it just stops there. 

I use the word parody a lot. I use it instead of the word 'idol', but idolatry is really what I'm talking about. Idolatry in its essence is when humans take a partial truth and exalt it as if it were the whole truth. Fundamentalists make an idol of the Bible, and to the extent that they do, their faith is a parody of faith. I'm sure many fundamentalists have genuine faith despite their fundamentalism, but I doubt it can grow to a mature fullness within its constraints. A Dawkinsian scientism makes an idol of spiritless matter, and so its 'truth' telling is also parodic. Idolatry necessarily follows from a failure to live in tension between the ontological opposites on which we find ourselves stretched.

An idol is always a false representation of what is, not because of what it affirms but because of what it leaves out. No single truth can stand in isolation; it is always part of a larger matrix of truths, and when this larger matrix is largely filtered out or delegitimated for whatever reason, then the isolated truth becomes mostly untrue. Is Darwin's theory of natural selection true? Yes, of course. But does it explain everything? No, of course not. Any philosophically thoughtful scientist would agree with that assertion. Darwinism, when fetishized, becomes an idol not for what it affirms, but for what it represses and leaves out. 

Science has no special knowledge of the truth; it simply develops models that work in a provisional way to make sense of what's known, but these models become obsolete when new knowledge comes to light that doesn't fit. And so better models need to be developed that give a better account of the data. I think that in a few generations people will look at Darwin and his followers as having developed a temporarily effective, but ultimately unsatisfactory model to explain certain aspects of biological developments over time. I suspect that some kind of future synthesis will be effected that will owe as much to Hegel and German Idealism as to Darwin. 

The naive materialistic ontology of scientism is idolatry because of what it leaves out. The naive fideism of evangelicals is idolatry because of what it leaves out. Faith is real, the empirical, material world is real. But that we are materially embodied spiritual beings points to a deeper reality because of the paradox that it entails. The resolution of that paradox is the only path toward the realization of our genuine uniqueness. The rejection of paradox necessarily leads to parody. Idolatry is now and always has been the greatest impediment to the development of the human spirit.

Quote of the Day: Thomas Edsall

"In God We Divide", by Thomas Edsall in today's NYT

...the “most powerful simple way to understand the electorate” is as composed of “white Christians (half), white seculars (a quarter) and voters of color (a quarter).”

Citing data from Pew, he noted that white Christians favored Trump 67 to 27, while white seculars favored Clinton 63-28 and voters of color favored Clinton 75-20. In more recent polling, he said, sorting by religion provides more insight than by education:

White non-college secular men support the generic Democrat by 17 points, while white college Evangelical women support Trump by 47 points, a 64 point gap going in the opposite direction from what education and gender would predict.

In addition, he continued, “identifying yourself as Christian in America today means that you are identifying yourself with a particular set of values that systematically set you apart from those who do not.”

The substitution, he wrote,

of “non-college” for “Christian” in elite discourse is consequential and damaging to progressive prospects. Pretty much everyone loosely agrees that Republicans want America the way they think it was and are revolting against cosmopolitan modernization, including even science. But naming white non-college voters as the Republican base suggests that the source of Republican grievance is lack of education, which organizes the conversation that follows about everything else. Imagine instead, the conversation that would follow from identifying the source of Republican grievance as religious.

Religion, he continued, “is real with values and motivated institutions, while non-college is barely more than an analytical category. Christians call themselves Christians, non-college folks don’t call themselves uneducated. Christian is an identity, non-college is a label.”

Religiosity has joined issues which cluster around race, immigration, abortion, women’s rights, gay marriage, the traditional nuclear family and globalization — all reinforced by the parallel split between urban and rural America, which is playing out again in our response to the dangers posed by coronavirus.

In “Red Versus Blue,” David Hopkins accurately sums up the situation:

Perpetually vigorous competition between two closely matched parties that each maintain reliable electoral dominance over a significant, and roughly equal, proportion of the nation’s geographic territory has become a signature characteristic of American politics in the twenty- first century.

The result is a national politics in which conflict replaces resolution. Hopkins goes on:

The appearance of distinct and stable geographic alignments on the contemporary electoral map thus serves as an apt visual symbol of an era defined by the emergence of intense partisan conflict among leaders and citizens alike. With the vast majority of voters now providing consistent support to the candidates of a single party in national elections, and with Democratic and Republican politicians collectively shifting toward opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, the United States has entered a political age characterized by the dual trends of mass-level partisanship and elite- level polarization.

I think this pretty accurately explains why White Evangelicals and conservative Catholics give Christianity a bad name. It's not about education; it's about anger and resentment. It's not about hope and compassion, it's about fear and delusional thinking. The proof of it is in that 67% of White Christians approve Trump. No more evidence need be provided. At least 27% have retained their wits and some level of composure. Among them you will find the true remnant. One's politics is not an essential indicator of of faith, but it is an indicator of one's grasp of reality. And if faith isn't something that enables you to see reality more clearly and deeply, it isn't really faith. It's just run-of-the-mill ideology. 

Edsall on the Republicans

Quoting longtime Republican Strategist Stuart Stevens's book, It Was All a Lie:

“As much as I’d love to go to bed at night reassuring myself that Donald Trump was some freak product of the system — a ‘black swan,’” Stevens writes, “I can’t do it”:

I can’t keep lying to myself to ward off the depressing reality that I had been lying to myself for decades. There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.

“I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”

What were the lies? That the Republican Party “espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party.”

And what is the truth? The Republican Party is “just a white grievance party.”

Race, Stevens writes,

has defined the modern Republican Party. After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump.

In fact, Stevens told me, “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party:”

With Trump, the Party has grown comfortable as a white grievance party. Is that racist? Yes, I think it is. Are 63 million plus people who supported Trump racist? No, absolutely not. But to support Trump is to make peace with white grievance and hate.

Thomas Edsall, NYT 3/18/20

Lying to oneself is something we all do, but Republicans do it collectively in a particularly toxic if psychologically naive way. They really believe they are the righteous ones when it truth they are just resentment-obsessed fools who have no true sense of what is right or wrong except that if it was wrong for grandad, it's wrong for me.

Do Republicans have things to be aggrieved about? Yes, but they can get in line. There's nothing special about their grievances, and in the grand historical scheme of things, they have much less to complain about than other groups. But this goes to the heart of the social psychology that animates their sense of grievance. Theirs are the grievances of the have nots worried about being overtaken by people who have even less.

I thought that was dramatized in an interesting way in Parasite in the conflict between the first housekeeper and the new one. There was nothing racial about it, but it's the same dynamic that keeps both white and black have-nots stuck in place. Somebody who has only a little sees his enemy in those who have less rather than in those who have more. They who have less have more in common with one another, but the system is rigged in such a way as to keep the have-nots fighting among themselves rather than fighting against those who have more to get their fair share.

That's the point of the violent scene at the party. The Father finally recognizes his real enemy--the rich homeowner. It's provoked when the homeowner winces at the odor of the now dead man he will replace in the basement hideaway. It's a moment of class solidarity, that we who smell badly are being kept in line by those who smell good. Would that such a moment of class solidarity could occur between white and black have-nots in this country. But alas.

And so the biggest problem, as this blog has been pointing out for nearly two decades, is that aggrieved white Republicans in this country allow the oligarchs who are the real cause of their grievances to manipulate them in such a way that they see Blacks and Liberals (Yankees) as their enemies. The problem isn't Liberalism; it's the disruptive, culturally destructive forces unleashed by capitalism.

And it's the Social Darwinist ideology, a social construction if there ever was one, that justifies capitalism as a system where anyone who is willing to compete and work hard can be a winner. And anybody who is a loser must be morally degenerate. This winner/loser scheme meshes with the reprobate/elect legacy of Calvinism, which shapes the social imaginary of most white evangelicals.

And so in the weird late-Capitalist world we currently inhabit, white Republicans live in a social imaginary in which the uber-reprobate Trump is their hero because he is a Winner, and so must be chosen by God. And so they don't see people like him as the enemy because they want to be winners like him. That's what America is all about, and that's what real Americans work for, right?--to be winners like Trump in the Social Darwinist game. But the corollary is also true--they won't join with aggrieved Blacks because they cannot admit to themselves that in fact they are, in fact, like them losers in the Social Darwinist game and reprobates in the Calvinist soteriology. That is the biggest lie that keeps the system of haves and have nots working like the well-oiled machine that it is. 

The question is whether white Losers are ever going to figure out that the solution is to change the game. That this Social Darwinist game and its accompanying Calvinist soteriology has nothing to do with Christianity and the spirit of the Gospels. I think that some white Christians honestly thought that Trump was going to be a game changer, but if it's not clear by now, he's not. He's simply a tool, a useful idiot, being used by the Mitch McConnells of the Republican Party to keep the game going. All Trump has given us is chaos and incompetence, and we will pay for both for years to come. 

The Republican Plague

It seems that anytime we have serious domestic disasters, we have the government-hating Republicans running the government, and so we have 9/11, Katrina, the 2008 financial meltdown, and now the Corona pandemic. The severity of this pandemic in the U.S. remains to be seen. But if you're worried, you have good reason to be.

This much is real: While the vast majority of people will be seriously affected, the real problem is overwhelming the existing, inadequately prepared healthcare infrastructure so that people who are seriously ill, whether they have Corona Virus or not, will not be adequately treated. That's what justifies the extreme steps local governments are taking, and they are right to take them. 

It's very likely that, despite these steps, we will be Italy in a week or two, and so you better hope that you or anyone you care about doesn't get sick--with anything requiring a doctor's care. 

Because whenever we have Republicans in charge, we have people who are ideologically incapable of dealing with social complexity, which guarantees that their response will be incompetent--either absurdly inadequate as with Katrina or massively wrongheaded as in the invasion of Iraq after 9/11. It remains to be seen whether what we are in the midst of now will eclipse even the worst negative effects of the Bush/Cheney insanity.

Republicans have become the party of ignoramuses elected by Americans who vote for reasons that have little to do with competency and almost everything to do with cultural resentment. And the result has been the gradual destruction of the institutions that are designed to provide a minimum of social stability and fairness, and in their destruction have created conditions of social chaos that liberate the predators to do as they please. This liberation of the predators is brought on the other Bush/Cheney fiasco, the financial meltdown of 2008. 

The Bush/Cheney administration should have delegitimized Republicans as a governing party for a generation, and yet they thrive. And we have now in Trump and McConnell two human beings who are utterly unmatched for the challenges that confront us. Trump has turned the country into a banana republic characterized not by the rule of law, but by the law of the jungle. And the question is whether Americans will keep putting people like him in office because of their Liberal hatred and cultural grievance. 

The Republicans have good reason to worry in the short run, but they shouldn't in the long run. They have every reason to trust in the naïveté and ignorance of so many Americans who will come back to them once the dust settles, which, if the Dems sweep in November, it will. Nevertheless, it wouldn't surprise me if the Trump/McConnell cabal use the pandemic to try to call off the elections this fall. Don't think they're not talking about it. It's what the leaders of banana republics do. 

State of the Race 6

It looks like Democrats are going to vote their fears rather than their hopes, for the past rather than for the future, for Joe Biden rather than for Bernie Sanders. It's understandable if not particularly admirable. But I should be old enough to understand that expecting to find something to admire in the average liberal Democrat is a fool's game. Comfort before all else. 

But voting one's fears is more understandable at this time considering the mad man in the White House, and now this pandemic, and the plummeting financial markets. Everything seems to be spinning out of control, and while a guy like Biden symbolizes more than he actually is--stability, competency, decency, sanity--he should be supported by all those who value stability, competency, decency, and sanity. So it's time to unite around the symbol and hope the people around him are more capable than he is.  

I have no better understanding of the thinking of the people closest to Biden, but I hope they listen to people like Will Willkinson. 

State of the Race 5

So this is what I feared after South Carolina: all the Nervous Nellies in the Democratic party have given Biden the boost he needs to make this race a contentious one until the convention. Even if Biden comes out of Super Tuesday with a delegate lead--still unknown at this writing as we wait for California results--Bernie and the fervent support that he generates is not going away. I fear this civil war within the Democratic Party will go to the bitter end, which is the worst possible scenario for getting rid of Trump. 

Until a few days ago, nobody, including me, thought that Joe Biden was viable, and for good reason. The wins he got tonight, imo, are a form of mass, wishy-washy "liberal" hysteria driven by some misguided hope that what America really needs now is a safe, politics-as-usual candidate to beat Trump. And, btw, the Burisma thing is not going away. 

I think the country is going to wake up in a week or so with buyers' remorse about Biden. He is just not up to it. Everybody knew that this but now seems to have forgotten it because he got one win in a conservative state. His win in S.C. doesn't change who Biden fundamentally is but everybody is behaving today as if it has. When the dust settles we'll be reminded who he is. 

Biden is a candidate that the Democratic political and media establishments will prop up as an empty figurehead of the Washington Consensus. Everybody can go back to sleep thinking the dragon has been slain, and the underlying problems for which Trump is a symptom will continue to get worse. 

So with Warren's candidacy all-but-dead, I'll be voting for Bernie in the March 10 primary in Washington State. But I could change my mind if before then Biden negotiates with Warren to be his running mate in the interests of putting together a ticket that unites both wings of the party. I could get behind a Biden/Warren unity ticket with the expectation that Biden's health and mental competency make him a one-term, placeholder president with Warren the heir apparent. It's important that the two wings unite, and that's the closest to a unity ticket we're going to get. 

But that's not likely to happen soon, if ever. Biden would likely choose Klobuchar before Warren. That would be the conventional way that conventional people like Biden and those around him think. Choose a woman from a midwest, purplish state. So Bernie's my guy until if/when Biden takes the nomination away from him, at which point I'll support Biden because anybody but Trump. 

Things might begin now to settle into something more familiar in a two-candidate race between Biden and Bernie, but I don't think we're done with surprises.