Hong Kong is an island (and an oligarchy)

I have hesitated a long time before writing or publishing this post. In fact, most of it is roughly two years old, and as old as four, dating back to when I had to go to Canton and Hong Kong on visa-related business to bring my family back here. But certain current events thrusting Hong Kong back into the international spotlight have pushed me to update and complete this piece. To start with, let’s analyse certain gæographical and œcological realities briefly.

Hong Kong imports over 90% of its food – and at that, the vast, vast bulk comes from the mainland, including 94% of the city’s fresh pork, 100% of its fresh beef, 92% of its fresh vegetables and 97% of its freshwater fish. It imports between 70% and 80% by volume of its fresh water from the East River in Guangdong. Hong Kong’s electricity grid is interconnected with that on the mainland, and 23% of its total electricity is supplied directly from the mainland, much of that through the nuclear power plant in Shenzhen. For the remainder of its electricity, Hong Kong relies on coal and natural gas (also significantly imported from the mainland, though also from Indonesia and Singapore), with only 2% of its total consumption originating with renewable sources. In addition, tourism remains a vital œconomic sector for Hong Kong and accounts for five per cent of its GDP and over seven per cent of its employment, and mainland visitors account for nearly 80% of this sector’s custom.

Hong Kong also produces a vast amount of solid waste (to the tune of 6.4 million tonnes a year), has been running out of landfill space for a long time, and outsources the bulk of its recycling to – you guessed it! – the mainland. Hong Kong is notorious for its e-waste production (and the big HK shipping concerns also trade in e-waste from other countries), and much of this e-waste ends up in Guangdong, in poor villages like Guiyu. This is a question I should know a thing or two about – analysing e-waste flows, including destinations for international shipment, was part of my group’s research project on the 2010 Covered Device Recycling Act for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Suffice it to say, Hong Kong as a municipality has basically built itself up, since the late 1970’s, on a finance-led œconomic structure in ways which render it not only almost entirely dependent on the mainland for basic sustenance and support of a high-modern / high-tech / high-rise living standard. That said, Hong Kong happens to have one of the world’s highest urban income gaps, a legacy which significantly predates the 1997 handover (with 1971 being cited as the last year in which income disparity was this high).

So how did this financial-services led local œconomy play itself out? Hong Kong was flooded with wealth, but that wealth was largely in the hands of the same four families (Li, Ho, Hui and Lo). But instead of investing some of that wealth into, say, microchip or biotech or medical services development – all of which would have kept Hong Kong at the vanguard of the Chinese œconomy – instead they chose to sink that wealth back into real estate, fuelling speculation on an already-overpriced housing market. That was the quickest way to earn money, but not the wisest. Now, places like Shanghai and Chongqing are outstripping Hong Kong as preferred places of investment, and Hong Kong is no longer ‘top dog’ in China. That loss of internal status, along with the massive wealth gap, housing crisis and environmental crisis, seem to be what is driving a lot of the anxiety and anger that these middle and upper-middle class young people are experiencing now. It’s leading them to lash out at mainlanders as well as other foreign residents of the city. It strikes me that the defensiveness around the status of the Cantonese language (which is not dead and will never die so long as karaoke is a thing) stems from the same set of anxieties.

Some personal background here. I visited Hong Kong myself in 2005 on a seminar, and again went to the Delta in 2015 on visa-related business. During the first trip, I stayed at Hong Kong Baptist University during the week of 1 July, which coincided with the pro-democracy protests. Even though I was a visiting student, I did get the full tourist treatment. I got handed protest literature. I ate durian-flavoured ice cream. I visited the big malls, the schmancy restaurants (that’s the technical term) featuring dishes from any part of any animal you can think of, the Buddhist temples, the painfully-authentic British-style pubs.

But my strongest impressions of the place were Dickensian. You could see high-flyers driving Lamborghinis, Maseratis or Bentleys around in the nice mall districts, and then turn around to see old people of retirement age picking up litter for change, having no other way to supplement their meagre-to-non-existent pensions. You could go out to sea and visit the places where people rented out rooms on rusty decades-old boats floating on garbage-littered water because they couldn’t afford to live on land – and from the deck you might have a perfect view of the glittering glass-and-steel skyline. (The boat-dwelling practice is actually, in part, one remnant of a cruel Song-era ethnic caste system which was done away with by the Qing Dynasty’s heroic Yongzheng Emperor, only to be reintroduced informally by the British.) The sight of five-star hotels in spitting distance (figuratively speaking) from overcrowded public housing projects still remains somewhat disconcerting to me, and looms quite large in my memory of the place.

The point here, though, is not to bash Hong Kong as a place, or Hongkongers in general as people – the great majority of whom are victims, not perpetrators, of these circumstances. The point is to provide a certain degree of perspective. Hong Kong faces an unfavourable situation, and a broad array of thus-far intractable environmental, social and œconomic problems. The net effect of these problems is to reduce many of the island’s inhabitants to a state of path-dependence on the well-entrenched oligarchical system of rule which goes back over a century. It is this oligarchical system of native tycoons, and the colonial-legacy civil service system which supports it, which currently underwrites the vast majority of Hong Kong’s œconomic and political woes – not Beijing.

It is unclear to me how, if at all, the current protest movement in Hong Kong is liable to change anything for the better about this basic state-of-affairs, particularly when the movement itself tends to be pro-oligarch and pro-big business after the fashion of the Western liberal politics it emulates, or else ressentiment-filled, nativist and xenophobic after the fashion of those same Western countries’ current backlash politics. Does attacking government buildings with black paint and racist anti-Chinese slogans, harassing random old men in airports or kidnapping journalists, beating them up and denying them medical attention, get the great majority of Hongkongers any closer to a semblance of œconomic dignity, fair rents and land prices – or a better and more sustainable environmental model, which would seem to be a prerequisite for any meaningful sort of independence? It’s very telling that these protests, like the 2014 ones, are not driven by the working class, but by the relatively-privileged middle class. Poorer, more conservative neighbourhoods like Yuen Long and North Point have been decidedly unsympathetic to the protests.

It’s quite true that I used to be far more sympathetic to the Umbrella Movement than I am now. And I still hold to the view that Hongkongers – particularly working-class Hongkongers – have very good reason to be upset, about the income inequality and œcological problems in particular! But, at the risk of being one of those pesky Western types who refuses to fall in line behind Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, these current protesters haven’t learned anything from the Umbrella Movement’s failure, and they haven’t addressed the real agents of their island’s immiseration. More than that, much of their resentment against the mainland and mainlanders seems psychologically-driven by a loss of their uniquely-privileged status in the broader Chinese world. Hong Kong is still an island, but no longer uniquely wealthy or glamorous. That’s been a long time in coming. But because it’s not solely Beijing’s fault, it’s a lot harder to protest against.

What’s worth conserving

Among the best – that is to say, the most morally trustworthy and authoritative – of people that I’ve ever known, my grandfather on my mother’s side figures near the apex. Holden Doane was a farmer in the true hill-Yankee mould (hardworking, tireless, thrifty, resourceful, respectful of the land and its limits and potentials), belonging to a long line of Vermont farmers of the same name going back to 1815. Even my first memories of him are those of an ancient old man, but as powerful and sturdy as the maples he tapped for a living. Powerful – but not violent. Holden Doane was a Methodist to his very bones, including in his commitment to peace, a commitment which went far deeper than mere outward pacifism. It was built into his habits, his character. He was careful, spare and gentle in his voice – but when he spoke, you listened. When he made a request of you, you did it. His patience was the stuff of hagiography. He cared deeply for all of his neighbours, even those who tried that legendary patience. And it goes without saying that he loved all of us far more deeply than we could have appreciated.

I remember that my mother once described him, politically, as an ‘Eisenhower conservative’: ever distrustful of the ‘Three Bigs’ (that is to say, ‘big government’, ‘big business’ and ‘big organisations’). He believed that hard work should be rewarded; laziness not so much. His opinions of new developments (whether a Walmart or a new tract of suburban housing in former farmland) were seldom expressed, but I never remember them being at all positive. His land and its ways: that he understood. His community: that too. But the party of Eisenhower, as it turned out in his later years, cared very little for either of those things. Without changing his fundamental beliefs or political orientation, toward the end of his life he became an Obamacon and an environmental activist – a devotee of the countercultural way of Andrew Bacevich and Bill McKibben.

Why do I bring up my grandfather and his relationship to politics?

Simply put: a few of my friends online simply do not see the use of conservatism. For them, conservatism merely consists of a set of empty, discredited pieties: a body of myths that even its adherents don’t believe and are willing to cast off when inconvenient. Worse still, conservatism has become, in their eyes, the embodiment of hypocrisy. Watching the same evangelicals who despised the forty-second president for his infidelities and crass womanising turn a blind eye to the forty-fifth’s, has been particularly galling to them. Most recently, some of my online acquaintance have latched onto Ross Douthat’s recent sadly ill-thought article on ‘incels’ as proof that conservatism is a morally-bankrupt whited sepulchre filled with the rotting bones of ressentiment and lust for power over others.

I’m here to (again) push back against that particular prejudice. I cannot, and never will, accept the idea that my grandfather’s views were morally-bankrupt, lived as they were from the context of a life that was more than merely conventionally moral, but actively generous and aggressively peaceable (if that makes any sense).

The intellectual substance of conservatism – not, I hasten to record, the shadow of it that stalks American political fora like a particularly deranged hobgoblin – is something that’s gripped my imagination since the eighth grade, when I had a contrarian Irish-American High Tory social studies teacher who taught us out of Howard Zinn’s People’s History. But the one who really fired my enthusiasm for that substance was the Mount Holyoke poet-historian Peter Viereck. His work fairly brimmed with the same powerful-but-gentle spirit that presided over our family visits to the Vermont maple farm. Like my grandfather, too, Viereck was deeply alienated from the rank ideological morass that took the place of his initial poetic vision, and by the wild, tyrant-spirited demagoguery that threatened to replace at every turn the moderation he had so carefully cultivated.

Is conservatism, in the Doane-Viereck sense that I’m using the word here, doomed forever to a Faustian bargain? Are the only choices before it, those of becoming a monster, or else becoming an increasingly-irrelevant and watered-down shade of liberalism? I dearly hope not. And insofar as all good things do partake in some fundamental existence, I dare to think that this substance may yet survive the doom which its imitators attempt to inflict on it. Even though my own politics seem to default to some form of Christian socialism, I’m still not quite comfortable with the label. I continue to draw inspiration and strength from other wells, including that which Holden Doane tended so faithfully.

Truth be bought?

Warning: blog-rant ahead.

Binding snobbery be damned. There, I said it.

Look, I’m as much a fan of a physical book as anyone else, and I do understand – and to some extent share – the æsthetic, the psychological and the normative arguments for connecting with a real book in binding as opposed to words in a text file flashed on the screen of a mobile or an e-book. But my liking for physical paper and binding is conditioned by my three-year economic exile in China where English-language books were a rarity and where my old outdated third-generation Kindle device was a godsend.

More to the point, though, I am an avowed fan of Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive and other free public-domain classics – the Jowett translations of Plato, for example, the poems of Robert Southey, the Canterbury Tales, Ivanhoe – which provide an immense store of knowledge, and indeed the better part of it, free of charge. These websites, which do not place a price on ancient wisdom but instead transfer it to anyone who wishes to seek it without asking so much as a penny, are an invaluable service to humankind. And the people who turn up their noses at such things are, indeed, snobs. And snobs of the worst sort, since they prefer the luxury of shelling out anywhere between $10 and $100 – at the least, in the case of some academic works, but my ire on that score will have to wait for another post – to e-books which can be found available for free, to anyone who has internet access and a mobile (which is most people these days).

If one has the inclination, one can immerse oneself in the great works ancient and modern philosophy both, classic literature, history, theology, all for less than the cost of a cup of tea. That is a very powerful thing – something which none of the ancients, or even Johannes Gutenberg himself, would dared have imagine in their wildest of ‘winged visions’.

But – here’s the thing. It’s often contended, more often by people who have no sense of ancient principles and people who actively abuse and contort ancient knowledge to serve ideological ends, that people will only value what they can pay for, and that education (a ‘product’ and ‘service’ in their view, commensurate with all other products and services available on ‘the market’) is no exception. And here’s the thing: they do have a point. Apart from weird ex-expats like me – who depend on Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive Classics for their sanity in places where bookstores were prohibitively out-of-reach, where Amazon was more expensive than it was worth, and where English language books in general were overpriced and of low quality – who really does use these services? And who uses them to expand their horizons and acquire the elements of a liberal education in a day and age where liberal education is itself prohibitively-overpriced for many people?

These are not rhetorical questions – I really would be interested to know. But in my own rather limited experience these are a rather slim minority of people (and, like I said, weirdos). Rather than this showing the virtue, however, of the ‘market’ system the aforesaid Actonites and Pragerites advocate, this shows rather its desolation. The ‘market’ they advocate floods us with cheap – cheap, that is, but not free – entertainment, which is readily and greedily consumed (including by weirdos like me, let me be clear. God forgive me, I’m no less guilty of self-medicating with ‘light’ entertainment, movies and music than anyone else), whilst the wells of wisdom ladling out their medicines for free go nigh untouched.

Capitalists, and indeed the defenders of the capitalist system, understand this perfectly well. They depend on it, in fact. The Mammon-worshipping roaders and running-dogs of the Acton Institute want people to think in brutish, consequentialist terms – the terms of the belly, the terms of comfort and ease and happiness, the terms of ‘utility’. Their sordid sophistries and calculating manipulations of the ancients and of other noble philosophers are aimed at a single goal. They want to convince the everyday American that they have the only ideological system that ‘works’ (and that furthermore is blessed by God), and that any other course would lead them to disaster. And of course that system is sustained by convincing people that the only value there is, is that which can be rendered in terms of economic ‘utility’, and which can be converted into other forms of ‘happiness’ by means of money.

People only value what they pay for, because they are told to value it by a culture which measures success solely in terms of monetary earnings. We are told not to value what has been tested as true, what inspires with beauty, or what persuades with goodness. There is much in our present time that has intrinsic value, which can be simply picked up with a wireless connexion. It’s time we learn to cherish it. And furthermore, it’s time we learn to distinguish wisdom not by the acquisition of costly degrees and titles, or of the prestige (that is to say, expense) of the institutions at which they are attained, but instead by that thirst with which people seek out truth.

FedEx (a rant)

Happens more often than you think.

I dread going to FedEx.

Generally, when I go to the post office, I get quick, reliable and friendly service from people who take their job seriously and who will generally treat you well. In nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America post offices were once centres of the community where people would come to hang out, and there’s still something of a cheerful and homey feel to a lot of them; even nowadays when they’ve been ‘professionalised’ the people who work there will still make conversation with you and joke with you while they work. I’ve stopped into the post office on Seventh Street twenty minutes before work to pick up packages, with two women behind the desk and six people ahead of me in line, and still gotten my package with a smile and gotten to work on time. I’ve never had the USPS fail to deliver a package, though there was one time when they delivered my diploma from the University of Pittsburgh and it fell behind the heating grate on the landing of my apartment building, and they (understandably) couldn’t tell me what happened to it. It was a stroke of luck that let me see the corner of the envelope peeking out from behind the grate. So yes, I got my diploma a couple of weeks late, but if we’re being fair, that wasn’t their fault.

Not so with FedEx.

My wife had to get her paperwork for completing an application for a green card from the notoriously-truculent American consulate in Guangzhou. We were at a point in the process where the deadline for her mandatory physical examination was due to expire, and thus the paperwork was somewhat time-sensitive. It seemed that the only way to get the paperwork there on time was to fly it out by courier rather than mailing it by slow boat. However, the woman who worked at the FedEx Office told us that, a.) they were not allowed by law to deliver papers to any residential address in China; and b.) the courier service would not be able to deliver the papers to any address in China before Jessie had to get down to Guangzhou for her physical exam.

Fine. We’d still get them there, even if it was a few days late and had to arrive at the school that I used to teach at, to be picked up by my old colleague, Mr. H—, who would then give it to Jessie. We paid $91.50 for that service.

I checked with Mr. H— to see if my package had arrived on time. No, it hadn’t. Imagine my reaction when I saw on the FedEx website that the package could not be delivered because I’d given them the wrong address. The address that I had worked and lived at for a year. Irate, I called up FedEx, which transferred me to some poor fellow sitting in a cubicle in India, and told them that no, I hadn’t given them the wrong address, and could they try again to deliver the package? The Indian bloke told me he couldn’t guarantee anything, but he’d see what he could do. Long story short, it turned out I was right and they delivered the package to the school—five days after they said they would. For that privilege, I paid ninety-one dollars and fifty cents.

Another time, FedEx couldn’t deliver a package to my house, so they left one of those ‘sorry we missed you’ post-its on the front door. (Note: neither USPS nor UPS has had this problem.) I had to drive all the way up to Roseville to get my package. I was the only person in the room, and the woman behind the desk kept me waiting for a full 15 minutes while she was on the phone, while a queue behind me started to form, then got my package and refused to answer my questions about why it couldn’t be delivered.

More recently – my workplace uses FedEx for all their printing services. I find this an… unfortunate choice, but what can I do? I order 6 copies of a 40-page PowerPoint presentation, spiral-bound, with a clear vinyl cover and a black vinyl back. I get to the FedEx Printing Centre the next morning to pick them up, and what do they give me? 12 copies of some 4-page document I don’t even recognise, stapled! I told them it wasn’t my order, and they didn’t believe me at first, and had to check the computer to figure out that I wasn’t trying to welsh them or something. This was also a time-sensitive document, so there wasn’t anything for it but to wait another 20 minutes while they did the correct print job. (It took three of these middle-aged guys to process my order, and I was worried for a while that they didn’t even look to see if each packet was in the correct order or had the right number of pages!) But they eventually handed me what I’d asked for, without so much as an apology until I was already on my way out the door, and even then only as a grumbling afterthought.

Huzzah for the superior service of the private sector in the free freaking market, huh?

I tell you this much – if not at my employer’s behest, I’m not darkening the doorstep of a FedEx ever again.

EDIT: Hat-tip to my reader Peter Gardner for this amusing article illustrating, for a less-grouchy contrast, the admirable lengths the good men and women of the US Postal Service will go to to deliver all manner of packages. And I really do mean all manner!

The political is the personal

I came very, very late to the pro-life camp.

To be honest, it was one of those issues that I’d never given a lot of thought to. And of course my knowledge of how these things worked was presented to me entirely in the abstract. Even as I was beginning to question the language of ‘rights’ as a culturally-determined category, I was still thinking in terms of ‘bodily integrity’, of the philosophical question of when an infant life began, in accordance with highly abstract and rights-bound rubrics. Even when I began to question those rubrics, my fallback was still upon philosophical, rationalistic Hegelian abstractions that allowed me to hedge somewhere in the muddled middle, that allowed me to avoid staking out a conscientious position. The feminist charge that men can only understand these issues on an abstract, detached and intellectual level, and that such abstract understanding is necessarily more attenuated than that of a concrete connexion, applied in spades to me.

It was a woman who changed that for me. Well, two, actually.

Eleanore Guiane Dorothy was neither expected, nor planned, nor convenient. She did not happen within wedlock. She happened when the two of us were being ‘careful’, with everything that noisome nominalist sex-educational sense of the word can be taken to imply. I didn’t know how to react when my girlfriend, now my wife Jessie, came into the bedroom with her pregnancy test in hand, and showed me the bright blue stripe that told me she was there. Both of us were graduate students, with more classwork, research and other projects on our hands than either of us knew how to handle rightly in addition to a pregnancy. Neither of us had immediate job prospects. There was the problem of immigration for Jessie. There was the problem of applying for state assistance. There was the problem of paying medical bills. And there we both were, wondering and yet still unable to articulate the depth of the problem we were in. Frightened out of our wits. Still to my shame, Jessie’s parents knew about Eleanore well before mine did.

It was Jessie who told me forthrightly that she didn’t want to terminate the pregnancy, because she was worried how it might impact her health. And I supported her as best I knew how at the time. But it wasn’t until I saw her – Eleanore – for the first time, on an ultrasound screen at a community health centre on Craig Street, that I understood who it was growing inside Jessie. Who. Not what. Not a clump of cells. Not a blob of protoplasm. Not a mistake. Not an option.

I don’t want to make this sound like some instant flash of insight, some thunderbolt revelation, because it wasn’t. It wasn’t some like some stentorian voice from the heavens opened up and told me: ‘Behold, your daughter.’ I’m too much of a blockheaded bookworm to have believed it anyway; the one ‘conversion experience’ in my whole life to which I can legitimately lay claim happened when I was reading Berdyaev. It’s weird to say – it was more of an æsthetic experience than a theological one. It was a feeling that was completely this-worldly, concrete and biological. I’d never really bought into the pro-life rhetoric about fingers or toes or eyeballs being important. (And actually, I still don’t. Still pictures simply don’t convey the emotional impact.) But seeing that ultrasound was like seeing one of the statues at the WaterFire summer festivals leap suddenly, shockingly, to life, and realising that actually under all the polystyrene prosthetics and make-up that there is an actor, a person, beneath it. On the computer screen in that clinic room, the whole and not just the head and hands and feet, what I was seeing was unmistakeably human. Breathtakingly beautiful. And unmistakeably my daughter.

And I understood then that I wouldn’t be able to bear to let her go. Neither would Jessie.

Eleanore, if ever you happen to read this: your mother and I never planned to have you. But you happened. And then you were wanted, very much so. And you are deeply, deeply loved.

Intellectually, this æsthetic, emotional, biological experience began gradually shaping my social thinking. If Eleanore was just as she appeared to Jessie and me, then the same could hold true of all her fellows who were not yet born. Being a consistent leftist and truly valuing equality in a defensible cosmic sense, then, meant being beholden to the idea that every such unborn child was also unmistakeably human, beautiful and connected. Cosmically speaking, there is no such thing as an ‘unwanted’ pregnancy, for the same reason that there is no such thing, cosmically, as an ‘undesirable’ or ‘unclean’ person, or an ‘untouchable’ caste. And from there, I evolved a Dickensian revulsion to the entire language of ‘unwanted’ children.

Even now, my reaction to the ‘reproductive rights’ lobby’s entire model of operation – their latching onto needy neighbourhoods and women in states of financial and personal desperation; their dissection of their progeny; and their ghoulish carting off of the pieces to laboratories for money – is a Dickensian one. If the abortion lobby ever offended me on a theological level, it offended me on a social-justice level first. And the arguments that Richards and company have so far rallied in their own defence are but parodies (and rather shoddy ones at that) of the same sort of Victorian attitudes which sent poor proletarian children, ‘unwanted’ and otherwise, to work twelve-hour days in workhouses with their possibly-lethal conditions all for their ‘health’, for the social good and for the good of their parents. Though many such workhouses, ostensibly public institutions, were being run for private profit behind the scenes.

Just as Victorian England with its Poor Laws thought that the workhouses constituted a ‘solution’ to the problems of the supposedly over-fecund poor created by an industrialising capitalist society, the late-capitalists of post-Roe America seem to think these grisly charnel-houses are some sort of ‘solution’ to the problems of poor women. They are no such thing, however they may present themselves. Honestly, we need more real community clinics which provide real healthcare at no or nominal cost to the patient. We need legally-protected paid maternity leave. We need a living, family wage. We need stronger unions for the working class, which will aggressively promote the interests and benefits of members who are women and married men.

It really is true what they say about the political being the personal. It’s personal for me.

Now in Nanjing

I’m currently at the Hopkins Centre at Nanjing University at the invitation of a friend of mine, Dr Adam Webb, to be discussant at a philosophy discussion about Jiang Qing’s political Confucianism and possible routes and limits of oecumenical dialogue (hopefully with some reference to the work of Thomas Han Hong-Soon!). It’s bound to be a truly fun talk in any event; I am told that there will be in attendance at least one Chinese grad student who is a committed Rawlsean, and one professor with decidedly left-anarchist sympathies. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes! I’m already enjoying my stay immensely; Dr Webb’s work is fascinating, and he has given me already a great deal to think about recent Middle Eastern politics, and Egyptian politics in particular.

Happy New Year to you all, gentle readers, and let’s await Christ’s birth together in joyful expectation!

The Feast of the Angelic Doctor

This time last year, I was working on my master’s thesis, whose topic was the influence of the physical presence of public school facilities on civic participation in Homewood. My topic, which started off far too broad and had to be narrowed down drastically in order to be workable, was in no small part inspired by reading De Regno, a treatise on government by St Thomas Aquinas which also touched on the art of good urban living. St Thomas, as the official theologian which the modern Roman Catholic Church takes as its guide, has an undeserved reputation in this unenlightened age as being stodgy and conservative (even boring), when in truth he was anything but. His work was a monumental and indeed politically radical attempt to reconcile the thought of Aristotle with contemporary Catholic theology, an attempt whose success is enshrined in his designation as a Doctor of the Church in 1568. He also inspired and embodied an entire tradition of apologetics which involves standing in the shoes of the other, and truly following the Pauline exhortation to test all things, and to hold fast to the good no matter the source.

Indeed, much of his work has not lost its radical bite, especially in our age where many injustices and acts of cruelty are tolerated and even encouraged openly. He denounced lending at interest (that is, usury) as being a violation of the natural law, in a straightforward way which makes me surprised that he was not employed regularly by the Occupy movement:

On the contrary, it is written (Exodus 22:25): “If thou lend money to any of thy people that is poor, that dwelleth with thee, thou shalt not be hard upon them as an extortioner, nor oppress them with usuries.”

I answer that, to take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice. On order to make this evident, we must observe that there are certain things the use of which consists in their consumption: thus we consume wine when we use it for drink and we consume wheat when we use it for food. Wherefore in such like things the use of the thing must not be reckoned apart from the thing itself, and whoever is granted the use of the thing, is granted the thing itself and for this reason, to lend things of this kin is to transfer the ownership. Accordingly if a man wanted to sell wine separately from the use of the wine, he would be selling the same thing twice, or he would be selling what does not exist, wherefore he would evidently commit a sin of injustice. On like manner he commits an injustice who lends wine or wheat, and asks for double payment, viz. one, the return of the thing in equal measure, the other, the price of the use, which is called usury.

On the other hand, there are things the use of which does not consist in their consumption: thus to use a house is to dwell in it, not to destroy it. Wherefore in such things both may be granted: for instance, one man may hand over to another the ownership of his house while reserving to himself the use of it for a time, or vice versa, he may grant the use of the house, while retaining the ownership. For this reason a man may lawfully make a charge for the use of his house, and, besides this, revendicate the house from the person to whom he has granted its use, as happens in renting and letting a house.

Now money, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. v, 5; Polit. i, 3) was invented chiefly for the purpose of exchange: and consequently the proper and principal use of money is its consumption or alienation whereby it is sunk in exchange. Hence it is by its very nature unlawful to take payment for the use of money lent, which payment is known as usury: and just as a man is bound to restore other ill-gotten goods, so is he bound to restore the money which he has taken in usury.

And also on the topic of the right ends of ownership and the proper distribution of property, and whether taking without consent is lawful in cases of need, also from his Summa Theologica:

On the contrary, in cases of need all things are common property, so that there would seem to be no sin in taking another's property, for need has made it common.

I answer that, things which are of human right cannot derogate from natural right or Divine right. Now according to the natural order established by Divine Providence, inferior things are ordained for the purpose of succoring man's needs by their means. Wherefore the division and appropriation of things which are based on human law, do not preclude the fact that man's needs have to be remedied by means of these very things. Hence whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor. For this reason Ambrose [Loc. cit., 2, Objection 3] says, and his words are embodied in the Decretals (Dist. xlvii, can. Sicut ii): “It is the hungry man's bread that you withhold, the naked man's cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man's ransom and freedom.”

Since, however, there are many who are in need, while it is impossible for all to be succored by means of the same thing, each one is entrusted with the stewardship of his own things, so that out of them he may come to the aid of those who are in need. Nevertheless, if the need be so manifest and urgent, that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand (for instance when a person is in some imminent danger, and there is no other possible remedy), then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another's property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery.

It is especially on the feast day of the Angelic Doctor that we should be reminded of the thread of radicalism running through his work, echoed also in De Regno (which could serve as inspiration, as it did for me, for many other communitarians, environmentalists and advocates of ‘smart growth’ against the soulless anti-aesthetics of suburban sprawl and high modernism). There is great wisdom in the West’s middle age, and most of it to be found amongst the works of St Thomas.

The Great Diploma Hunt

It was a balmy summer in the Year of Our Lord 2012, when our hero first set out upon his quest to earn the rank of Master of International Development from the mysterious academy deep in the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania known only as the University of Pittsburgh. It must be made plain that our hero would do nothing by halves, but rather foolishly insisted upon being set upon three impossible tasks by the wise masters of his programme at the University. Well, not technically ‘impossible’; after all, he did accomplish them, but very difficult and not in the least because they all had to be completed within the same term: the Thesis, the Capstone and the Independent Research Paper. These he stalked in the long, dusty, collapsible corridors of the second floor of the arcane and freshman-infested Hillman Library, through stacks of venerable and ancient tomes inscribed in the language of Cathay, chased through far-off lands such as Homewood neighbourhood in Pittsburgh’s East Side, and aided a band of noble heroes and heroines in seeking ways to improve the plight of southwestern Pennsylvania’s electronic waste. At long last, after the epic struggle with the guardians of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations website to upload and publish his work, his journey came to an end. He returned home to his native country in Rhode Island, to await the arrival of his certification.

Weeks passed, and still our hero had received no word from the University. Weeks dragged into months; eventually, he returned to Pittsburgh to attempt to track down his diploma, on an Odinic ride fuelled by carbonated maize-based beverages and set to a soundtrack consisting primarily of Tad Morose. The kindly staff of the University had already sent out his diploma, and asked if he had checked with the post in Rhode Island. Sadly, he had. The ride continued to the post office in Oakland, where they too informed him that they had seen neither hide nor hair of the package he sought. Dejected, he finally arrived at the doorstep of his former home. He found the door slightly ajar, and after looking carefully around he found no packages - until the letters ‘PLOMA - DO NOT BEND’ caught his eye from behind the radiator grill on the landing. Indeed, they had sent the diploma to the wrong address, and it had sat half-obscured behind the radiator God only knows how many days before our hero chanced to unearth it. In the end, however, our hero emerged triumphant.

First of May

Happy International Labour Day! Also, happy ‘my thesis is done and I now have a master’s degree’ day, at least for me. It has been an exhausting couple of months, with the end of term, my thesis being wrapped up and my getting married, but I should hope I pulled through it with some measure of grace and gratitude. Well, we shall see what Mrs Cooper has to say about that, but… I for one am a bit relieved. Now it is only a matter of finding a job in a very slow market…

Not the Poland they fought for + personal update

The redoubtable Czarny Kot has translated into English a highly-interesting article in Przegłąd by Krzysztof Pilawski, about the history of the Wałęsa family, from the Communist period up to the modern day.  I think the point is well-taken that large families such as the one Lech and Danuta had would not have the same opportunities under the modern regime that they had even under the Soviet puppet state - not that the latter is at all again to be desired.  The tragedy is that the Solidarność movement had such enormous potential to create a different dimension of politics that would not fall into the neoliberal-versus-social-parliamentarian axis which defines modern Europe.  A very highly recommended read.

...  and in a bit of personal news, I am now a newlywed, to Jessie Zong - the same wonderful young woman I have been dating for two years during my graduate school career.  Our situation is somewhat unorthodox on account of our graduate school schedule, but we do plan on having a full church ceremony sometime next month.  Wish us luck!

Confucianism as religion: preparing new rituals on ancient ground

Confucius Temple in Beijing 北京孔廟

The following was submitted as a paper for Dr Paul Nelson’s ‘Religion and Development’ course at GSPIA on 6 April 2012.

The debate over whether Confucianism is a ‘religion’ is a venerable one in Sinological circles, hearkening back to debates between Christian missionaries in Asia and the defenders of the Confucian tradition. The ambiguous position of the concept of tian in the Confucian belief-system, along with the semi-agnostic nature of Confucianism regarding the supernatural and the afterlife, led many Western thinkers to place it outside the category of ‘religion’, of which the archetypes were the Abrahamic traditions with their shared insistence on a transcendent, universal God and the eschatological fate of each human being (Cavanaugh 2007). Asian scholars themselves are divided on the issue: on the one hand, Confucianism-as-religion was conceived by cultural nationalists at the turn of the century as a possible response to Western colonialism and conversion; on the other, to secular Chinese reformers of the Republican era who saw it as a symbol of the corrupt lao shehui which was holding back China from modernity, it was merely an outmoded philosophy – the creation of a religion from it was essentially an inauthentic reaction to Western forces and did not even reflect the true purposes of Confucius himself, who never relied upon supernatural powers or evocation of the transcendent to draw people to his message (Coppel 1989). And yet, in spite of the successes of the Republican government and of the Communist one which followed, not only the teachings of Confucius but also the rituals and material culture reflecting them have endured and indeed experienced a revival in recent years.

Part of the reason for this century-old debate is the fact that ‘Confucianism’ as a term has no real analogue in the original Chinese: it can be rendered as rujiao (‘scholastic doctrine’), as ruxue (‘scholastic learning’) or as rujia (‘the scholastic school [of thought]’). Of the three, the first has religious connotations (partly as a result of the translation of the English term ‘religion’ into Mandarin Chinese as zongjiao, implying both worship and formal doctrines), whereas the second two are more ‘secular’ and imply philosophical or ideological inclinations (Sun 2005). In some Asian countries, such as Indonesia and South Korea, Confucianism is considered a religion and its temples (litang, wenmiao) are viewed in the eyes of the law as houses of worship. There is currently a movement in Mainland China, drawing most of its support from academics and public officials, to have Confucianism recognised as a religion, and the traditional Temples to Confucius (kongmiao) recognised as places of worship (Yang 2007). This movement is far from new, however – the grassroots Indonesian Kongjiao Zonghui movement (itself inspired by the late Qing reform movements in mainland China) served as inspiration for more top-down efforts by the warlord Yuan Shikai and by the reformist activist and philosopher Kang Youwei to establish a religious Confucianism or ‘Confucianity’, efforts which were vigorously attacked by more liberal Republicans (Coppel 1989; Sun 2005) and by Marxists, who wished to categorise Confucianism as a religion and thus to safely manage it (Sun 2005) and relegate it to a ‘superstitious feudal’ (fengjian mixin) past, even though there were virtually no people on the mainland in the early Communist era who would have described themselves as religious ‘Confucians’ the way they might have described themselves as ‘Christians’.

Although the Chinese government still holds (on paper) to the anticlerical, atheistic doctrine of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the ideology has been soundly on the retreat for the past thirty years since the death of Mao Zedong. On the ground, the aggressive capitalism, market reforms and increasingly unaccountable government which have replaced it have led to a crisis of faith, so to speak, for a great many Chinese people. In the past few years, Christian churches (even those registered by the government, such as Gangwashi and Chongwenmen in Beijing) have become increasingly strident in their messages and have attracted many adult converts; to a certain extent, the same is true of the Buddhist temples, such as Miaoyingsi Baita (Cooper 2007). The growing popularity of religion in Mainland China speaks to the cultural, moral and religious vacuum which arose in the wake of the Cultural Revolution as the state first overreached and then repudiated its own role as an essentially religious force, which various religious traditions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, have attempted to fill in the meanwhile. Among these religious traditions attempting to gain cultural traction, also, is Confucianism – or at least, Confucian revivalism in the process of being reinterpreted as a religion. This movement has seen some institutional support and support from scholarly movements, from New Confucian scholar Kang Xiaoguang’s 2003 ‘Outline for a Cultural Nationalism’ and the 2004 Jiashen Wenhua Xuanyan to the establishment of state-sponsored Confucius Institutes (Kongzi Xueyuan) both in China and abroad (including one at the University of Pittsburgh) to elaborate public celebrations of the birthday of Confucius (Xu et al. 2004; Yang 2007). Since 2001, a spirited and often acerbic debate has been taking place within the academic community as well, particularly within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, concerning the status of Confucianism as a religion (Sun 2005).

At the grassroots level, however, the Temples to Confucius (kongmiao) are presently heavily patronised in post-Cultural Revolution China. To a certain extent, they occupy the same ambiguous and uncomfortable space in contemporary Chinese material culture and daily life as Buddhist temples do: though they have been deliberately preserved by the (atheistic) Chinese authorities essentially to serve as cultural sites and museums, and are still marketed as such by tourism and travel agencies (Cooper 2007; Mu 2011), they are visited as places of worship by the general populace. In Taiwan and among the Chinese diaspora, there has been a more or less continuous use of Confucian temples for religious devotions, as well as the much more widespread use of Confucian ritual forms in syncretic folk-religionist, ancestor-worship, Daoist and Buddhist observances (Clart 2003). There, as on the mainland, students would often offer prayers and make offerings in Temples of Confucius for help on examinations (Sun 2005) or simply out of veneration for his teachings and his place in Chinese culture (Mu 2011). On the mainland, in Qufu, Shandong Province, the hometown of Master Kong Qiu, the ‘original’ Confucian temple has been restored from its destruction during the Cultural Revolution (Overmyer 2003) and is in active use. An elaborate ceremony and memorial procession is held annually in Qufu every 28th of September; though there are smaller celebrations at Temples of Confucius throughout China (Chinavine 2009). Statues of Confucius are being (re)erected on university and school campuses and in public places throughout China, and classes in ‘national learning’ (guoxue) and in the Confucian Classics are gaining greater and greater prominence (Yang 2007).

And yet, though the impact of these seemingly innocuous academic revivals are much more subtle than those of Buddhism or Christianity (both of which have long and colourful histories of active proselytisation), these Confucian devotions and this burgeoning renaissance of the Confucian Classics are also playing a rather significant role in the quest to shape new moral identities in China. The appeal of Confucianism both in the West and in China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (where much energy was spent in the continual destruction of anything bearing a whiff of Master Kong) draws both upon a transgressive impulse to subvert a revolution which failed, and upon a genuine desire to build upon a transcendental, axial tradition which is positively and distinctively Chinese.

Sun Xiaodong hypothesises that the religious or quasi-religious rise in popular worship of Confucius is attributable to the long-standing ethical system associated with Confucian teachings, and to the ready identification of Confucian tradition with distinctively Chinese culture and nationhood (Sun 2005). Columbia University’s W. Theodore de Bary describes his own ambivalence to this revivalist attitude, particularly amongst ‘young people’ and marks some of the difficulties with adapting Confucianism to the role many idealistic Chinese students would have it play, charging full-steam ahead into the century-old debate about the religious qualities (or lack thereof) of Confucianism, and at the same time speaking to the lasting appeal of Master Kong’s humanist values (de Bary 1988). But where the daily devotions and the thirst for knowledge on the part of young people meets the academic field where Confucianism is supposed to thrive best, is precisely where even further complications begin.

Master Kong’s legacy is now being comprehended and rearticulated in at least three different ways. The first, common in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the overseas Chinese community and exemplified in the work of Tu Weiming (Professor of Confucian Studies at Harvard University) and Robert Neville (former dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University), who have come to be known as the Boston Confucians. Both seek to find perspectives of overlap between the thought of the Confucian Classics and amenable points of contact with secular Western liberalism and theories of democracy and human rights (Tu 2002) and with Christianity (Neville 2003) in order to give Confucianism a legitimate foothold in modern philosophical discourse and from thence create a broader platform from which Confucians can engage with contemporary problems in precisely the ways de Bary claims challenged classical Confucian thinkers and their intellectual progeny all the way up through the end of the lao shehui. Tu and Neville provide a conduit to relate and reinterpret the intellectual struggles faced by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese communities as they have confronted the weighty contradictions of modernity with Confucianism foremost among their intellectual paradigms.

On the other hand, a much more conservative (and yet more radical and populist) academic approach to Confucianism has made its presence amply felt. The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Professor Kang Xiaoguang on the academic side and Yu Dan on the pop-culture side (Yang 2007) are the standard-bearers for this phenomenon. Inherent to their readings of the Classics and of the broader tradition is the critique of the general arc of Chinese society from the Republican Era through the Communist Era, the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping’s gaige kaifang (‘reform and opening’) to the present day – the crisis of legitimacy and the loss of a coherent moral narrative are definitive of modern China. Kang cites an alliance of large business interests and the ruling elites at the centre of the crisis, and notes that their rapacious behaviour has eroded the fabrics of trust and of empathy which must sustain any just society. His twin critiques of capitalistic Western liberalism and of Marxian communism (whether deliberate or coincidental) mirror very closely the rhetoric and logic of Catholic social teaching: what is demanded is good government, aligning with principles of social justice and mutual responsibility rooted in the virtues and lived experience of a specific community. It is from here that he reads Confucianism both as a radical interlocutor of Western liberalism and as the solution to China’s current dead-end course in an amoral market and an amoral state. He cites Confucian reformer Kang Youwei as the primary model for building a more just, more equitable and more humane China on Confucian principles (Kang 2006).

Beijing Normal University’s Yu Dan’s much-maligned (by academics and public intellectuals), more popular interpretation of Confucian teachings, including a television serial on exegesis of the Confucian Lunyu (The Analects) and a mass-market book touching on similar themes, though not as overtly radical as Kang Xiaoguang’s critical use of Confucian doctrine, still seeks to provide a replacement in the popular imagination for a culture she feels is becoming too materialistic. Though Yu’s work may be the Confucian equivalent of the toothless, vaguely-spiritual American ‘inspirational literature’ (Martinsen 2007), she is nevertheless articulating a message which is running at odds with a post-Deng Chinese consumer culture and attempting to get her audience to think on different dimensions. Her work has been a phenomenal success – the first run of her book (600,000 copies) sold out within four days of publication (Yang 2007).

Yet a third strain is the same Chinese state’s attempt to appropriate Confucian imagery and symbolism through the Kongzi Xueyuan and other official outlets and endorsements of traditional Chinese culture. The Chinese Ministries of Culture and of Education were very quick to pick up on the cultural shift back toward Confucian thought and expression in the early 2000’s, and in 2006 the Ministry of Culture elaborated in its five-year plan the need for ‘protection of national culture’, the reinvigoration of traditional holidays and the promotion of the Classics. As the Chinese state is suffering from a crisis of moral legitimacy, yoking Confucian doctrine to the cause of nationalism as a means of retaining cultural and political dominance is understandably seen as a prudent strategy (Yang 2007). Kang Xiaoguang notes that the Chinese government, in its public use of the language of ‘harmony’ (hexie) and the ‘well-off society’ (xiaokang shehui), was already beginning to incorporate ancient patterns of Confucian thought in place of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist doctrine, and to privilege (at least in its official language) class collaboration over either class struggle or the post-Deng ‘alliance of the elites’ (Kang 2006).

Does this attempt to synthesise modern nationalism with Confucian trappings necessarily turn this Confucian revivalism into yet another form of state propaganda? Many scholars have been tempted to say so, but qualitative studies such as the one conducted by French sinologists Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval in 2008 show that laypeople do have what might be considered genuine religious experiences stemming from encounters with Confucian thought. They trace the story of a Liaoning native who went from being a PLA dancer to a successful businesswoman in the gaige kaifang period to a Buddhist neophyte and then to a student of Confucius by way of Taiwanese philosopher Wang Caigui. Her religious experiences led her to a concern for individual peace of mind and for social justice that is summed up in the phrase anshen liming (‘be at peace and fulfill [one’s] duty’; Billioud and Thoraval 2008).

Thus, it appears that there are two separate, though contemporary and interlinking motions toward the reintroduction of Confucianism as a religion in the daily life of Chinese society. The first, a genuine, organic religious or quasi-religious expression by students, intellectuals and common people who wish to pay tribute to Confucius as a patron of culture and learning, is contiguous with and part of a long-standing tradition of veneration of Confucius and his students by ordinary Chinese. The second, also prominently drawing from students and intellectuals, deliberately and actively seeks to promote and evangelise these expressions as an alternative both to Marxist ideology and the growing dominance of cultural and political liberalism (what Yang Fenggang describes, somewhat unfairly, as ‘Confucian fundamentalism’). Though the cooptation by the state and by the Chinese Communist Party is viewed somewhat askance by Western (and some Chinese) observers, it would be mistaken to dismiss the newfound interest in Confucianism amongst Chinese intellectuals (among others) as merely a ploy for ideological legitimacy by a government which has run for practically thirty years without it. Confucianism in the mainland, far from being a dusty relic of a distant, superstitious feudal past, has a ‘future’, as Sun Xiaodong aptly puts it, ‘about to unfold right before our eyes’ (Sun 2005).

Appendix A: Chinese Terms and Proper Names

anshen liming 安身立命
Chongwenmen 崇文門
Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平
fengjian mixin 封建迷信
gaige kaifang 改革開放
Gangwashi 缸瓦市
guoxue 國學
hexie 和諧
Jiashen Wenhua Xuanyan 甲申文化宣言
Kang Xiaoguang 康曉光
Kang Youwei 康有為
Kong Qiu 孔丘
Kongjiao Zonghui 孔教宗會
kongmiao 孔廟
Kongzi Xueyuan 孔子學院
lao shehui 老社會
litang 禮堂
Lunyu 論語
Mao Zedong 毛澤東
Miaoyingsi Baita 妙應寺白塔
rujia 儒家
rujiao 儒教
ruxue 儒學
Shandong Qufu 山東曲阜
Sun Xiaodong 孫笑冬
tian 天
Tu Weiming 杜維明
Wang Caigui 王財貴
wenmiao 文廟
xiaokang shehui 小康社會
Yang Fenggang 楊鳳崗
Yu Dan 于丹
Yuan Shikai 袁世凱
zongjiao 宗教

Appendix B: Bibliography

• Billioud, Sébastien and Joël Thoraval. 2008. ‘The Contemporary Revival of Confucianism: Anshen Liming or the Religious Dimension of Confucianism’. China Perspectives 2008(3): 88-106.
  
• Cavanaugh, William. 2007. ‘Does Religion Cause Violence?’ Harvard Divinity Bulletin 35(2): 22-35.
  
• Chinavine. 2009. ‘Celebrations of Confucius’. University of Central Florida Online Archive. http://www.chinavine.ucf.edu/qufu/confucius_celebration/ (accessed 6 April 2012).
  
• Clart, Philip. 2003. ‘Confucius and the Mediums: Is There a “Popular Confucianism”?’ T’oung Pao 89: 1-38.
  
• Cooper, Matthew Franklin. 2007. ‘The Role of Religion in Modern China’. Capital Normal University. Integrative cultural research project.
  
• Coppel, Charles A. 1989. ‘«Is Confucianism a Religion?» A 1923 Debate in Java’. Archipel 38: 125-35.
  
• De Bary, W Theodore. 1988. ‘The Trouble with Confucianism’. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at the University of Berkeley, 133-83.
  
• Kang Xiaoguang. 2006. ‘Confucianisation: a Future in the Tradition’ (trans. Liu Huiqing). Social Research 73(1): 77-119.
  
• Martinsen, Joel. 2007. ‘Yu Dan: Defender of Traditional Culture, Force for Harmony’. Danwei. http://www.danwei.org/scholarship_and_education/yu_dan_defender_of_traditional.php (accessed 6 April 2012).
  
• Mu Duosheng. 2011. ‘Confucian Heritage Locked Behind Expensive Entrance Fees’. Global Times Online. http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/678663/Confucian-heritage-locked-behind-expensive-entrance-fees.aspx (accessed 6 April 2012).
  
• Neville, Robert C. 2003. ‘Response to Bryan W. van Norden’s Review of “Boston Confucianism”’. Philosophy East and West 53(3): 417-20.
  
• Overmyer, Daniel L. 2003. ‘Religion in China Today: Introduction’. The China Quarterly 174: 307-16.
  
• Sun Anna Xiao Dong. 2005. ‘The Fate of Confucianism as a Religion in Socialist China: Controversies and Paradoxes’. Chapter 9 in State, Market and Religions in Chinese Societies, eds. Yang Fenggang and Joseph B. Tamney, 229-51.
  
• Tu Weiming. 2002. ‘Confucianism and Liberalism’. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 2(1): 1-20.
  
• Xu Jialu et al. 2004. ‘Cultural Declaration in the Year of Jiashen’. People’s Daily Online. http://www.people.com.cn/GB/paper81/13119/1176605.html (accessed 6 April 2012).
  
• Yang Fenggang. 2007. ‘Cultural Dynamics in China: Today and in 2020’. Asia Policy 4: 41-52.

I’m back

Returning to Pittsburgh from a voyage in the Middle Kingdom to meet my girlfriend’s friends and family, I finally can update my blog once more. I find myself exhausted, jetlagged and down with a horrific head cold, but nonetheless very much rested and at peace – much more so than last semester. The blog has undergone a name-change (to The Heavy Anglican) which has been a fairly long time in coming… though existentialism and neo-orthodoxy remain very much a part of my worldview, they’ve taken a backseat somewhat to my amateurish interest in matters of political economy, history, development policy, international relations and how those all relate to theology and religion. The thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Niebuhr and Barth certainly do touch on all of these (often quite closely), but I am finding that authorities from other traditions can bring insights which are just as interesting and enlightening, and several thinkers whom I have come to greatly admire (Johnson, Swift, Ruskin, Chesterton, Grant and the like) simply do not belong to the existentialist tradition, but rather share with it the common ancient Socratic-Platonic one.

Anyhow, much peace and good cheer for the Yuletide season to my gentle readers, and may we have a joyous Year of Our Lord two thousand twelve. It’s good to be back.

Homeownership, rental and other matters: a distributist defence

The following was submitted by yours truly as an answer to one of the final exam long-answer questions in his neighbourhood planning and community development course. Hopefully it will manage to be thought-provoking!

The question of whether homeownership should continue to be encouraged over rental in the United States is both a contested and needful one at this point in our history as a nation, particularly in light of a financial crisis centred around the securitisation of risk in a speculative housing market. Quite understandably, a number of authors and commentators in the fields of planning, development and policy studies have weighed in on the topic. John Landis and Kirk McClure pose the problem most directly, and link the systemic problems in the current housing market to an ideologically-driven desire on the part of federal policymakers under Clinton and Bush 43 to expand homeownership as broadly as possible – they advocate instead a return ‘to what works’: a mix of rental housing vouchers, tax credits and federal housing initiatives (including HOPE VI) which have met with success under different administrations and economic conditions (Landis and McClure 2010, 340). Susan Saegert, Desiree Fields and Kimberly Libman answer this question – that homeownership has certainly been ‘oversold’ – and go on to pose a deeper one: to what extent is homeownership construed as a social duty in an ideological environment which privileges autonomy and consumption as central to the ‘American Dream’, and to what extent does it serve interests other than those of homeowners and prospective homeowners?

Though both papers are in some respects persuasive – the one from a pragmatic and the other from a more radical perspective – they each tantalisingly but only briefly touch on what this author believes to be the central issue. Landis and McClure believe that part of the current problem is that government assistance to homeowners is diverted in various ways away from those who need it most, and that renters find themselves systematically excluded under the current regime. Saegert et al. see the problem in a financial-government system that supports homeowners only to the extent that it serves the interests of lenders and insurers (Saegert et al 2009), and only to the extent that it ensures that risk is passed on to the ‘end consumer’, i.e. the homebuyer. These are both useful insights, but they both point in a direction partially belied by the conclusions of both authors: toward the heterodox economic philosophy of distributism. A third-way political-economic philosophy inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum Novarum (‘Of New Things’), distributism was developed by the work of several ex-Fabian socialists and radical Catholic thinkers, with Arthur Penty, Gilbert Chesterton, Fr Vincent McNabb, Hilaire Belloc and Fr José María Arizmendiarrieta being the primary authors and theorists associated with the movement. In short, it calls for the broadest possible distribution of productive property; economic protection of small and cooperative businesses; restructuring of the wage and banking systems; and generally a more direct relation between the laws and social norms governing property and the right purposes of that property (Distributist Review 2011).

As planners and developers of communities, we are, first and foremost, interested in creating and developing places balancing public and private affairs, where people can live, work and play. We are – or should be – normatively very closely concerned with the right use of property, and our policy agendas should certainly reflect that. To paraphrase contemporary American distributist John Médaille: the purpose of public policy is ‘to provide the conditions under which all… communities that make up the social fabric can flourish’, beginning with the family unit (Médaille 2010). Issues such as gentrification and sprawl, as well as the fatal cupidity of various agents in the financial sector which eased (perhaps too greatly) but did not support people’s acquisition of homes, arise primarily from lenders and insurers – as well as homeowners, to be sure – considering housing as something other than a place for a family to live.

It is noteworthy that the 30-year mortgage, enabled by the National Housing Act of 1934, was a working assumption of some of the most successful federal housing programmes of the past century: the loans insured by the FHA and VA were targeted primarily at new families in the wake of WWII. Homeownership was successfully expanded under these programmes and default rates were very low; and though these developments were plagued by the inequalities resulting from discriminatory practices such as redlining, the extension of the same opportunities to families of colour was accomplished under the 1968 Fair Housing Act (Landis and McClure 2010). During the 1970’s, however, houses became instead investments and objects of resale. There was a paradigmatic shift from the real estate as a place for a family to settle down and for a community to thereby develop to real estate as an instrument for making money. Not only homebuyers were affected by this shift, either – because speculation in land creates only rising prices in the long-run (until the bubble bursts), renters are also adversely affected by an intolerable rising pressure on rent (Médaille 2010).

In addition, the concomitant relaxation of the mortgage regulations targeting single-person, divorcee and other non-family households for the federal subsidy programme had a double consequence: the market for homes could steadily increase (and private lenders and insurers thereby benefit immensely) and federal money was made accessible to people whose primary interest in houses was, in fact, speculation. Further relaxation of housing-mortgage regulations followed on ideological grounds, beginning under the aegis of the Reagan Administration (Carlson 2009; Sternlieb and Hughes 1980; Saegert 2009). Though it is shamefully common for lending institutions and the ideological partisans of the neoliberal innovations of the past 30 years (e.g. CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s 2009 on-air rant) to lay the blame at the feet of undereducated consumers (Saegert 2009), it should be quite obvious to the astute observer that there is a path dependency at work involving far more systematic elements.

On the surface, therefore, it does appear from a policy perspective as though ‘homeownership’ as such is a problem, and privileging it over rental more so. But it is important to note that the reason for this is not that ‘homeownership’ qua homeownership is something overrated – rather the regulatory structure governing mortgage practices encouraging homeownership has been stripped not only of its powers but also of its normative content. At the same time, the interests both of eligible, working-class first-time homeowners and of underserved populations for whom rental may be a more viable option are paid lip-service but not truly served. To give just one example, research has been done at the University of Pittsburgh’s economics department suggesting that loosening local-level regulation against subprime lending and usurious lending practices, ostensibly in the name of ‘spur[ring] financial innovations that broadly benefit low-income households’, not only do not widen the total amount of credit available to homebuyers, they also have the undesirable effect of increasing default and foreclosure rates (Xu 2011).

The impact on communities as well as their working-class residents generally likewise continues to be severe. Urban sprawl had already become a problem in the post-war society, due in part to the ascendant ubiquity of the private automobile and the demise of the family farm under subsidised agribusiness, and definitely due in part to white flight, but it was certainly intensified and accelerated by a housing market increasingly characterised by speculative practices and short-term leasing rather than long-term mortgaging – by the early 1990s, ‘unprecedented’ amounts of what was previously farmland were still being developed for new housing tracts in the United States (Pendall et al. 2005). Among the responses aimed at conservation of the traditional community (particularly in an urban setting) have been the ‘smart growth’ and the ‘new urbanist’ movements, which call for mixed housing as well as zoning practices which encourage more active community life. Obviously, the issue of the neoliberalisation of housing policy has very far-reaching implications and not just for individual homebuyers.

Thus, the response to the question of how government agencies are best to provide assistance to homeowners and renters is best addressed not necessarily by one or two isolated policies, however subtle and pragmatic such policies may be. Instead, it appears that a broader policy platform – a distributist platform – is needed, one which reforms lending practices and specifies a proper use for real estate. Smarter regulation of the financial sector along the lines outlined above – and tougher enforcement of existing regulations – would appear to be a start.

Going further, however, encouraging more local, place-based, cooperative alternatives to traditional credit sources (such as credit unions) would ensure that property is disposed in ways which are actually beneficial to the community, as well as ensuring that the well-being of the person(s) or family purchasing the property is respected. Creating a subsidy system that privileges small farmers over-against large agribusinesses will also help to naturally constrain the onslaught of sprawl and discourage speculative housing markets in greenfield construction areas (though this must be accompanied by a legal reform which discourages abuse of eminent domain laws, at the expense of farmers in the interests of housing-and-transportation developers). Supporting mixed-use zoning initiatives will likewise encourage greater and more responsible homeownership by creating more opportunities for small, specialised home businesses – so much the better, if they are organised in the cooperative-syndicalist model of the mediaeval guild! Devolving more financial and economic regulatory powers to the local level (and preventing state-mandated deregulation such as happened in Cleveland) could also be of massive help in encouraging and protecting local development. Dismantling the highway system would be a bad idea at this point in our economic history, though we could certainly do with creating a system of weight-based tolls on public highways to eliminate the non-competitive advantage enjoyed by ‘big box’ stores and strip malls (Médaille 2010). In addition to rethinking public-sector subsidies for homeownership and rental, creating alternative housing schemes which discourage speculation, such as resale restrictions, cooperative land trusts, mutual housing associations or even something as simple as an option for outright purchase of rental property by instalment remain tantalising alternatives to the status quo (Carlson 2009; Stone 2008).

The question of homeownership vis-à-vis rental in public policy terms, then, is still an important one. However, though Saegert et al. identify a number of salient problems with the current system and though Landis and McClure set out what appears to be a good direction with regard to a fair and egalitarian policy agenda, that policy agenda could be greatly enriched by again placing a normative emphasis on the ends of homeownership – to benefit families and to allow the communities which make up the fabric of our society to flourish – and adjusting policy to meet those ends. It could also be further enriched by being made a part of a broader policy platform whose ultimate aim is the widest possible redistribution of the means of production.


Bibliography

• Carlson, Allan. 2009. ‘Servile World: How “The Big Business Government”, “The Loathsome Thing Called Social Service” and Other Distributist Nightmares All Came True’. Front Porch Republic. http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=4903#_edn7 (accessed 12 December 2011).
  
  
• Distributist Review. 2011. ‘Classic Reading List’. The Distributist Review. http://distributistreview.com/mag/test-2/recommended-reading/ (accessed 12 December 2011).
  
  
• Landis, John and Kirk McClure. 2010. ‘Rethinking Federal Housing Policy’. Journal of the American Planning Association 76(3): 320-1, 335, 340-1.
  
  
• Leo XIII. 1891. ‘Rerum Novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labour’. English translation online at Libreria Editrice Vaticana. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html (accessed 12 December 2011).
  
  
• Médaille, John. 2010. Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits and More, pp. 110-1, 155, 188-9. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
  
  
• Pendall, Rolf, Arthur Nelson, Casey Dawkins and Gerrit Knaap. 2005. ‘Connecting Smart Growth, Housing Affordability and Racial Equity’, in The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America by Xavier de Souza Briggs. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
  
  
• Saegert, Susan, Desiree Fields and Kimberly Libman. 2009. ‘Deflating the Dream: Radical Risk and the Neoliberalisation of Home Ownership’. Journal of Urban Affairs 31(3): 299, 300, 309-10, 312.
  
  
• Stone, Michael. 2008. ‘Social Housing’, in The Community Development Reader by James DeFilippis and Susan Saegert, pp. 67-78. New York, NY: Routledge Press.
  
  
• Xu Yilan. 2011. ‘Does Mortgage Deregulation Increase Foreclosures? Evidence from Cleveland’. University of Pittsburgh Department of Economics: Job Market Paper, presented 18 November 2011 at the University of Pittsburgh Centre for Social and Urban Research.

Full of grace

A happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin to one and all!

I’m still feeling slightly frazzled from final projects (one concerning a game-theoretic analysis of Greece and the EU, one concerning Brown University’s Asian student body, one concerning school impact on Homewood civic engagement and the last concerning the developments of Chinatowns on the East and West Coasts), and need to begin preparing soon for exams, as well as getting a visa for another China visit. To me have been now imparted several skills, including how to make maps with ArcGIS 10 and how to design a research proposal; as well as several old skills being further honed, such as how to scramble and slam out multiple papers during the last couple of weeks of term. And I am rereading Utopia. Such is graduate school; wouldn’t really have it any other way.

Jonathan Freedland: ‘It is democracy itself that the markets seem to despise’

Well, two final projects down for the term, and two more to go. Guess I have a little bit of time to work on a blog post now.

There was a very interesting piece in The Guardian by Jonathan Freedland a couple of weeks back. Though he does (along with the rest of the Guardian’s commentariat, not to mention that of the New York Times, the Washington Post and other American print) tend to draw distinctions in ways which are (I believe) a little bit too hard-and-fast between authoritarian and democratic (is Singapore as ‘authoritarian’ as the mainland? is Russia – where women very much have the rights to drive, vote and show their faces in public – anywhere near as ‘authoritarian’ as Saudi Arabia?), I believe the point he makes is a very sound one. Though the neoconservatives and the libertarians have long pretended otherwise, for the sensible and the attentive it has long since been the case that globalist, neoliberal capitalism and democracy make for very fidgety bedfellows indeed.

But in the light of the economic crisis, the strain in that relationship is starting to show more than ever. A referendum in Greece over the austerity measures being imposed on it from without was cancelled; pan-European technocrats have taken the reins of the Greek macroeconomy and are hell-bent on riding it roughshod over the working class, pensioners, civil servants and any other plebes who have the temerity (nay, the effrontery!) to take a train or a public bus to work, or to fall ill and take up precious hospital space.

In the meanwhile, in China, Bo Xilai and Wang Yang have been using local models in China in an attempt to shore up support for the more interventionist, public-good provisionist, actively anti-corruption Chongqing model and the more developmentalist, neoliberal, laissez-faire Guangdong model, respectively. Although both appear to be equally divergent from China’s current authoritarian-capitalist status quo (Mr Bo in the direction of greater economic democracy and a social safety net, Mr Wang in the direction of more authoritarian-capitalist ‘reforms’), in actuality Mr Bo is the more open to the guidance of democratic principles (willingly taking the advice of social democrats such as Dr Cui Zhiyuan, for example) and true exposure of the inner workings of the Chinese government to the public eye, whilst Mr Wang appears to be merely another rehash of Jiang Zemin: gleefully adopting the advice of market ‘reformers’ and technocrats and gutting public goods provision, and shielding those very same technocrats from any real sort of public scrutiny.

And, naturally, the same principle applies to public protests. The Chinese government under Jiang Zemin sounded a hasty retreat from Tian’anmen only for the 1989 protests to disappear quickly and quietly down the Memory Hole; the same sort of dynamic appears to be holding true for the Wukan protests under Wang Yang. (How long before that Google search is blocked?) By all means one may examine his motives, but even though Mr Bo Xilai appears prima facie to be more heavy-handed, we should keep in mind that thus far he has consistently moved in favour of truth-to-power, rather than in favour of erasing truth by momentarily constraining power.

And then we have, as Mr Freedland deftly points out, the peculiar breed of neoliberal / liberal-interventionist commentator in the United States which yearns for this country to ‘be China for a day’; and by China Mr Friedman evidently means Guangdong rather than Chongqing. Even though he is very quick to hedge his wish about with all the right liberal-democratic verbiage, this should tell one all one needs to know about where the sympathies of the neoliberals lie where issues of democracy, economic self-determination and the rule of law are concerned.

Be ye not fooled: the champions of the invisible hand are themselves apparently quite eager to equip it with a very visible steel gauntlet. Let us hope that our nations have the resilience to – to paraphrase Mr Freedland – assert that people, rather than markets, are sovereign.

EDIT: Here is an article describing Mr Bo’s drive to open official CCP archives to the public and focus more attention on the actions of government and Party members. One may argue that it is little more than Mr Bo blowing his own horn, but it does highlight one of the ways in which he represents a massive change for the People’s Republic, in a far less authoritarian direction.

An insightful and interesting talk by Dr Robert Putnam

The author of Bowling Alone, and one of the founding members of the communitarian political-philosophical movement in the United States, came to speak at Pitt at GSPIA’s invitation yesterday. And he didn’t aim small in terms of his topic: the relationship between social interconnectedness and economic equality.

His thesis is thus. There is a strong correlation between economic equality and social connectedness – that was the easy part to demonstrate. He plotted the levels of social trust against the GINI coefficient across the globe (the most trusting nations – and also the most equal – were the typical Northern European offenders: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Belarus; the least trusting nations were those like Brazil and Egypt with massive inequality problems), across the United States (almost straight down the OLS regression line, with Vermont topping the charts on both measures and Mississippi trailing in last place) and across Italian provinces (again, the data went straight along the regression line). The not-so-easy part was the direction of the causation. Though most laypeople (as well as most scholars) would answer if asked what the causal relationship was between the growing economic inequality and the social disconnect / hyper-individualism we see now in American society, we would tend to think that the causal relationship was one way: economic inequality causes social disconnect – with the causal explanation being something along the lines of poor people growing poorer growing envious of rich people getting richer, and rich people growing suspicious and untrusting of everyone they see as not sharing their interests. Dr Putnam argues that this is not, in fact, the case – rather, it is social disconnect which causes economic inequality.

Indeed, he showed the data, plotting over time the levels of social engagement and of income equality in the United States. Intriguingly enough, we see social capital peaking in the 1960’s, and falling off (first gradually, then more and more drastically) around the same time that Dr King was shot. Income equality, however, reached its peak in the Carter years, before plummeting with Reaganomics 15 years later. The level of correlation was, in fact, quite stunning. Dr Putnam built up a convincing case that those generations (particularly the WWII generation) which were most closely connected with each other tended to push harder for public policies which would benefit everyone equally – civil rights, Social Security, the Great Society… and those generations which were not closely connected with each other tended to be more concerned with individual welfare and individual profit.

He made some very, very decent points here, though I think he could have done a little better fleshing them out. He describes WWII as having been a major force in creating networks of social trust among people of all races and classes – pretty much everyone in the country knew someone who had been at war. Dr Putnam gladly acknowledged (when I raised this question at the end) that this was not the case either with Vietnam, or with our most recent post-conscription military adventures. At the same time, though, he also saw that supporting a national conscription or a national service policy would be rather a non-starter among my own age group.

The end of the talk was something of a clarion call, though – he described in a series of vignettes and statistical references the sort of society that we were rapidly becoming. The ‘good news’ was that middle-class families are staying together more (as in, divorcing less), spending more time with their kids, staying in one place more and getting involved in religious and community organisations more. Their children also were benefitting from this arrangement: middle-class high school students were more likely to have a sturdy network of friends and acquaintances, were more likely to build off of those networks through their secondary education years, and were more likely to succeed economically based on who they knew. The ‘bad news’ was that the American working class is, to increasing degrees, the American middle class’s Dorian Grey portrait: a working-class high school student is much more likely to be isolated growing up, to not have a secure living space, to have stressed and detached parents (and very likely a single or divorced parent), to not have a close and functional network of friends, and to not have access to the kinds of social capital that could alleviate economic stress. Even worse, this economic stress has every likelihood (due to the modern economy’s excessive demands on a worker’s time and its unstable, disruptive influence on family life) of perpetuating this isolation, creating a vicious cycle from which escape is made ever more difficult.

We are becoming, in other words, the world of another Sybil. However, unlike in Benjamin Disraeli’s novella, the divide is not between a wealthy nation and a poor nation; it is between a wealthy nation and what is increasingly looking nothing like a nation at all. The effects, though, are very likely to reach us all unless we begin bridging that gap.

Definitely food for thought. Not to mention action.

When the links to the video of this talk are made available on the GSPIA / Centre for Metropolitan Studies website, I shall certainly post them.