Urbana.org All Things New Blog - ethics

Hiroshima's Anniversary

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:01:00 -0600

It’s 64 years this Thursday since Hiroshima was destroyed with a nuclear bomb.

Historians and Military thinkers have debated ever since the strategic value of the bomb. It is possible to argue that lives were saved on balance by the bomb’s eliminating an Allied need for a land invasion of Japan, and so on.

But today I wonder a smaller question: not about those who made the decision to do it, but about those who chose the city of Hiroshima. Any of several cities could have been chosen, but what did it feel like around the conference table to choose this city over others?

Deep Green Nazis

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Yesterday I made a throwaway comment that one of the important gifts evangelicals can bring to environmentalism is the mental skill of holding global and local in tension. That probably needs some clarification.

On a daily basis, Christians do a mental gymnastics in reconciling opposite forces in the faith they hold: Christians belong to this world and to another at once. They belong to their local village and to each other on other sides of the globe; and at a profound level, they belong to each other even across enemy lines more than they belong to their next-door neighbors.

More importantly, Christians believe that the present world is irreplaceably important precisely because it is a fallen world that can be partially redeemed in the here and now, and that this world can be redeemed in the here and now because it is connected to the eternal.

The present world, ecological problems included, is connected to the eternal one not by magic or by fairy tunnels, but by relationships—by a God’s love. That’s the point of John’s description of Jesus as the Word made Flesh.

It is an unnatural (of sorts) way of thinking to claim to both belong to the world and to be alien from it. But everyone who is, as Jesus put it, again in John, born again, is born again into this tension, a tension with no chance of resolution in this life.

This is why Christians can, and have been, accused of both otherworldliness and profanity. The truth is both and neither.

Back to the environmental problem. The problem consumes our entire physical world, yet in certain respects is a spiritual problem: it relates to our souls.

Deep Ecology is a radical environmental philosophy I’ve done some reading on, most importantly in Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Contributors to the volume at several places make use of the concept of bioregionalism, which generally can be understood as resolute belonging to one’s biological-geographical place, in the food one eats, to the company one keeps.

Bioregionalism can be benign or dangerous. It can range from an insistence on eating food grown locally, to an aggressive resistance to foreign life and ideas.

If bioregionalism is the practical political philosophy of Deep Ecology, then Deep Ecology is entirely irreconcilable with Christianity, because of Christianity’s simultaneous insistence on the global and local. Bioregionalism can thus lead to a particular problem: ecofascism. In his contributing chapter, Possible Political Problems of Earth-Based Religiosity, Michael Zimmerman, now of the University of Colorado, writes:

Affirming that humanity is but one strand in the great web of life, Nazi ideologues trumpeted the now infamous slogan Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), which may be understood as a racist version of bioregionalism. The Nazis condemned Judaism and Christianity for being nature-hating, life-despising, and otherworldly.

"Forget keeping your hands clean"

Fri, 08 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

The problem of purity involves everything we touch. Recently, in discussing my retirement savings account with my father, I expressed the problem thus: inasmuch as my account is an index account, denominated in US dollars, its purpose is to match the performance of the US economy. Accordingly, inasmuch as I hope to benefit, in the future, from this account, I am morally implicated in the performance of the US economy.

Looking at Jesus’ permission to his disciples to pay taxes to the evil empire, I extrapolate: I am hoping to gain from the sum total of economic activity, the bulk of which is not being done unto Christ.

It’s a moral problem that relates to all of how we are to relate to the world. If we aren’t willing to entirely withdraw from the world, we have to be willing to touch unclean meat, figuratively speaking.

My father proposed that purity was to be measured differently, and that I ought to forget trying to keep my hands clean; purity is stronger and more flexible than petty rules.

How to Navigate Academic Culture Wars

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:01:00 -0600

I’ve heard some great advice in the last few days from an emeritus professor in the department I’m joining this fall. Speaking of the endless political, territorial and cultural wars in academia—the wars in which unsuspecting graduate students can be wielded as pawns—he said, and I paraphrase: You have a defensive tool and an offensive tool.

Rule #1.

Your defense is charity, in the old-fashioned sense. Treat everyone at all times with respect and genuine concern for their hopes and fears. Be affable and never, ever say a negative word about anyone, because everything you say, oral, email or otherwise, is on the permanent record.

This is a common sense value for survival, but also a particularly Christian value, one that very few Christians actually put in practice to the degree we ought to.

Rule #2.

Your offensive weapon, he continued,

is academic excellence. No matter how belligerent or activist a department, this is, after all, an academy. You’re there to perform academically. If you treat every assignment professionally, and work hard to publish, publish, publish, no one will lay a finger on you (provided you also heed rule number 1).

Now. This sounds reasonable. But does it work in practice? What do you think? Is charity possible? And if so, does it work? And if so, how does excellence play out in real life?

The Logic of Anti-War Rioting

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:31:00 -0600

If you’ve ever participated in a riot, especially one for peace, please speak up and correct me, because I’m about to go out on a limb here and call this weekend’s riots in Strasbourg, France, at the NATO summit, something worse than a contradiction: they’re pitiful.

From the outset, I’m no hawk. Nor am I a pacifist. I’m also open to persuasion about war in general, and about NATO in particular. But I can imagine why people wanted to protest. They might believe, for instance,

That NATO wages war unnecessarily;
That NATO makes Europe less safe;

Or more cosmically,

That NATO is a machine to secure global capitalism.

Or maybe they just wanted to burn a hotel to the ground.

Again, correct me if this is a misrepresentation. As someone who came of age in a non-NATO country in Western Europe during the cold war, I personally tend to credit NATO with keeping the Soviets out of the region. So while I may sympathize with peacemaking efforts, I’m not sure the NATO summit is the best symbolic event for the cause.

But was it about peace at all? Looking through flickr pages on the subject, I see two causes falsely conflated by the demonstrators:

The revolutionary struggle for Socialism, and
The struggle to abolish war.

The violence—the destruction, vandalism, and arson tends to suggest that the latter was primary in the minds of the rioters: the way to abolish war is to install a revolutionary socialist society.

But is there a deeper logic? Slavoj i ek has recently dusted off an old psychological term, passage à l’acte, or acting out, to shed some light on violence of this sort: as with the tantrums of a two-year-old, some violence is less an expression of power than an expression of powerlessness.

That is, people smash things, not in order to bring about the revolution (though that may be what they’d claim to be doing), but in order to express their frustration at their own impotence at bringing about the revolution.

Is that too condescending? Perhaps. But Anti-war riots are full of condescension, and contradictions. I’d love some help here. Got insight?

What's stronger than Privacy?

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:08:00 -0600

Is privacy as high as we can go?

I celebrate the European Court of Human Rights’ decision, from December 4, that Britain is wrong to store DNA information of innocent suspects—but wonder if privacy is as strong a foundation for human rights as it’s cracked up to be.

The ruling pertains to the 860,000 people without criminal records, whose DNA had been sampled while they were suspects. The two men who brought the suit did so under privacy concerns, claiming that having their information in the database was humiliating and stigmatizing.

While I agree with the ruling, I’ve been more than a little concerned with the long-term legal fate of genetic information. Privacy is just one small angle. There’s also ownership: the patenting of life.

Genetic tracing is one of several scientific and technological innovations that have grown far faster than our culture’s capacity to develop corresponding ethical standards. We have the power of Gods and the moral muscles of toddlers.

I am sure these issues are getting worked over at high levels in academies, religious bodies, and the like, but the threat is serious. I don’t know much about privacy law, but my sense is that even its greatest limits are insufficient to contain the potential for mischief carried by this new power.

Is there another ethics that reaches farther?