Pro-life Stupidity in Massachusetts

The latest cause of the pro-lifers, at least those who are Catholic, in Massachusetts is to help elect Scott Brown to fill the spot left vacant by the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. Brown has this statement on his website:

Abortion

While this decision should ultimately be made by the woman in consultation with her doctor, I believe we need to reduce the number of abortions in America. I believe government has the responsibility to regulate in this area and I support parental consent and notification requirements and I oppose partial birth abortion. I also believe there are people of good will on both sides of the issue and we ought to work together to support and promote adoption as an alternative to abortion.

Is this pro-life? “I think killing babies is kind of yuckie but the decision to kill babies or not should be made by the women and their doctors and only in accord with government regulations.” No wonder the enemies of Christianity don’t even bother to respect us.

With apologies to George Bernard Shaw, here’s the joke:

Brown: Will you vote for me if I support a woman’s right to abortion but hint I’ll to try to cut down on the number of abortions and to pay respect to parental authority?

Christian the pro-lifer: Well, yeah, I guess I would because there don’t seem to be any better candidates.

Campaign life goes on for several weeks…

Brown: Will you vote for me if I support a woman’s unlimited right to abortion with no restrictions, generous government funding, and a Planned Parenthood counselor in every hospital?

Christian the pro-lifer: What kind of a defender of innocent life do you think I am?

Brown: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating the details.

For those who are interested, this is alleged to be the original dialogue as found here (go down the page to Anecdotal Dialogue):

* GBS: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?

* Actress: My goodness, Well, I’d certainly think about it

* GBS: Would you sleep with me for a pound?

* Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!

* GBS: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

(This dialogue is also attributed to Winston Churchill).

Brown is at best abortion-advocate-lite and there are signs announcing enthusiastic support for Brown to be found on the yards of devout Catholics and in the windows of cars parked in front of Catholic churches. Maybe we should just complete our sell-out of Christ and hang placards from the feet of the crucifixes over altars.

Brown shows his moral integrity in his stance of so-called Obamacare. Heck, he’s bragged about helping to write and enact Mitt Romney’s pioneer version of governmental we-now-own-your-body health care expansion and now he solemnly proclaims his opposition to Obamacare. How else would he have suckered the Tea Party crowd into supporting him? The pro-lifers were easier. He only had to promise not to be as enthusiastic about killing babies as the average Massachusetts Democrat, and Martha Coakley is certainly average.

The pro-lifers will claim he’s the best they can get and we’ll have to support him and hope for the best. We’ve heard similar claims over the past few decades as Christian leaders have negotiated away their moral integrity, and that of American Christianity, step by step. Maybe Brown will be different? Maybe he won’t betray us as did the Supreme Court appointees of those alleged moral conservatives, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan? Maybe he won’t betray us as did the Bushes and Dole and nearly every Republican who so strongly supports morally conservative stances. So long as they’re out of power. In power, they at least maintain the status quo on abortion, big-government, the coming of the-government-owns-your-body healthcare, and other issues. In power, they often advance the agenda to which they claim to be opposed.

This is Einstein’s definition of insanity as found here:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

There was a man beheaded in Austria during World War II because he refused to serve in the Austrian Army once the Nazis had taken over Austria. He wasn’t a pacifist nor a coward. He’d gone on maneuvers as a reservist a few years earlier but he wouldn’t put on his uniform so long the Austrian Army served the evil purposes of the Nazis, even though he had some young daughters who would be orphaned and a young wife who’d face a tougher life without him.

His name was Franz Jaggerstatter. He was recently beatified by the Catholic Church, a major step in being declared a saint. I’m pretty sure I know where Jaggerstatter went after he was beheaded. I have fears about the destinations of those who collaborated with the Nazis because it seemed to be the less evil of choices at the time. I have suspicions about the destination of the bishop who advised him to serve in the Nazi-Austrian army for the sake of his young daughters. I have trouble imagining that Blessed Franz would have voted for Scott Brown even if a still more evil politician would have been elected. Christians don’t support great evil even when still greater evil is the other possibility. When those sorts of choices confront Christians, we have no choice but to to refuse to support either the great or the greater evil and to leave the matter in God’s hands. Admittedly, God’s solutions sometimes involve decades or even centuries of suffering and hard work to rebuild what we have allowed to decay, but He is the boss.

We’ve long passed the time when we Christians have to say the political entities of this age aren’t ours and we can only withdraw to build Christian communities and prepare for a future which will be better only if we put Christ and His commandments at the center of our thoughts rather than illusions that we’re clever enough to win something by negotiating with those who don’t share our moral committments and who have betrayed us consistently (Republicans in particular but establishment politicians in general). In the political realm, we Christians aren’t clever. The record indicates that we’re very stupid, at least that our leaders, including those in pro-life groups, are very stupid.

But cleverness was never the point. Moral integrity was the point. When you trim your principles, when you attempt to beat an immoral political system by using their own means, you’re compromising only one thing — your own moral character. If pro-lifers, moral conservatives in general, wish to do something, then boycott the system in a very public way. Let the world know the American political system has become an evil joke. Don’t enter the evil joke yourself and pretend you can turn it into an edifying tale. And, most of all, don’t try to drag Christ and the Body of Christ along with you as you travel some gradual road to Hell along side of the likes of Brown and Bush and whomever.

The Novel “A Man for Every Purpose” is Available for Download

[This is a copy of an entry at Acts of Being.]

In 2008, I put samples of three novels on this website for free download. I’ve now made the entire manuscript of A Man for Every Purpose available for personal use. This is a book that queries the human self-consciousness, the moral self-awareness: Where do you live? Past? Present? Future? All or none or one or two?

This book is under a somewhat restrictive Creative Commons license which is included with the manuscript. See Unpublished Novels for a description and for the link.

If You Sell Your Soul to the Devil, Don’t Be Upset When He Comes to Collect What Belongs to Him

Catholics and some other Christians are worried about the loss of a right by medical personnel to refuse participating in procedures which they consider wrong on moral grounds. That seems appropriate, but so does the statement:

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ [Mat 5:38]

But Jesus tells us that isn’t just inadequate, but fully wrong. He demanded of His followers:

But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you and do not refues him who would borrow from you. [Mat 5:39-42]

The followers of Christ are commanded to act in a way different from the morality of the world. We’re called to live as followers of Christ, obeying His commandments and trying to imitate His ways of speaking and behaving. Does that mean that when confronted with threats of evil from those who might be either willfully evil or merely misguided and deluded, we are to arrange for campaigns to swamp Pilate’s telephones with protests and to bury the Sanhedrin’s poor secretaries under mountains of post-cards asking that they respect the conscience of that poor Jesus of Nazareth?

I say this tongue-in-cheek but such campaigns of moral pressure might be appropriate, they might work, if our Pilates and our High Priests are in substantial agreement with us but prone to stray because of the temptations and pressures of power. That’s not the case in 2009. Our leaders, even when they make great shows of attending Christian worship services, clearly don’t feel bound by the Sermon on the Mount. Many clearly don’t feel bound by the Ten Commandments. Many radiate a sense of self-righteousness as they propose and carry out programs which violate the traditional moral teachings of the West but can be presented as a compassionate response to the sufferings of those with horrible diseases or those who feel sexual urges not allowed by traditional Christian morality. Some probably are truly motivated by subjective moral urgings to try and solve those problems. Certainly, that seems true of many of the medical researchers involved in stem-cell research which might involve embryonic lines of cells and might be moving towards human cloning to produce creatures with diabetes or Lou Gehrig’s Disease for experimentation, creatures which will never move beyond an embryonic stage and will never live outside of some antiseptic and glistening laboratory container. Years ago, doctors associated with Harvard Medical School made available lines of embryonic stem-cells for such experimentation and every so often announcements are made that someone has managed to engineer a line of stem-cells, maybe embryonic and maybe not, to have a certain defective gene or metabolic condition. We also have to remember that the techniques developed even in moral lines of research on adult stem-cells could be deployed rapidly to clone human beings or human-animal hybrids. In an age of moral disorder, all technologies can be deployed for questionable or downright evil purposes.

I’m willing to claim that nearly every research hospital in the United States, including probably most that were founded by Christian organizations — even Catholic religious orders, engage in activities which are in violation of at least the more demanding moral systems developed from the Sermon on the Mount and may well be in violation of the most lax interpretation of the Ten Commandments. At the very least, Catholic hospitals will ship poor and uninsured patients to ‘welfare’ hospitals in the same way as for-profit corporate hospitals. Finances force them to do so, you say? Why did they reorganize their finances so that they would be in such a position? Was their no one in those hospital systems, no one in the bureaucracies of the dioceses, no one in the ranks of Catholic businessmen serving on boards of trustees, no one at all who could see that they were transforming Catholic institutions into servants of the Principalities of this world? I would conjecture similar statements could be made about all those hospitals founded by other Christian groups, some of which still bear terms like ‘Presbyterian’ or ‘Methodist’ in their names.

If the medical systems in the United States operate in ways that are morally objectionable to Catholics or other Christians, if the American government — duly elected by the American citizenry — increasingly subsidizes acts which Catholics and other Christians consider to be evil, why do Christians wish to participate in those systems and why do they accept money and other gifts from that government?

I’ve seen arguments that any who disengage from these increasingly evil institutions need time to do so gradually but now we see that such doctors, nurses, and others might have no place to go. If it were ever possible to aim at some sort of separation, the time has likely passed. We, and our parents, have forced us into a position where we have but two choices, suffering as did our Lord Jesus Christ or surrendering to the Principalities of the world.

In allegorical terms, Christ is being freshly crucified in these United States of America, and few Christians have picked up their crosses to march alongside their Lord. Those who take their beliefs seriously are more likely to be canvassing the crowds of those watching in confusion or horror or glee as Christ moves by under the burden of His cross. Why are those Christians canvassing the crowds? Apparently, they think to convince Pilate and the Sanhedrin to change their ways of thought and behavior. They think to convince the Principalities of the world to give up what supports their worldly power and take up with beliefs that will deny the authority of earthly rulers to dictate what is right and what is wrong.

They think the world is to be redeemed not by acts of suffering and martyrdom but rather by political processes by which we’ll somehow achieve that fantastic result of non-believers and weak believers choosing to live by Christian moral laws. Didn’t Christ give us those laws in the Sermon on the Mount? Well, yes, Christ gave us those laws in a very emotional way that provided for some of the most moving scenes in the history of Hollywood productions. I’m sometimes proud and sometimes ashamed when my emotions lead me to tears as I read those words of our Lord.

Such emotions played no part in our Lord’s own ways of showing compassion, nor in the ways of the greatest of saints, detached as they have to be when relieving spiritual or corporeal sufferings. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t validated by those subjective feelings, warm or shivery, which they draw forth, nor were they validated by internal coherence nor by natural law reasoning but rather by His later submission to the unjust acts of His own creatures. When Christ hung on His cross, His authority to make extraordinary demands upon us was validated, not because He was suffering for us but rather because He was offering Himself to the Father in an act of obedience beyond our understanding. If we take Christ’s own actions seriously, His refusal to so much as preach to Pilate or the Sanhedrin, we are forced to believe the only way to change the behavior of non-believers and weak believers is through suffering and death, that of Christ first but that of His followers when necessary. Not all ages are filled with martyrs and not all forms of martyrdom have been the same but we Christians in 2009 seem to be in the position of having to pay the bill for a lot of sins over a number of generations.

Let’s think seriously again about our situation in 2009. Having corrupted even knowledge of God’s own Creation to our own purposes, having accepted gifts from men who value money and power above all conflicting moral demands, we wish to claim to be loyal followers of the God whose commandments we’ve disobeyed. We tell ourselves that it might be true that even Catholic hospitals accept money from a government which helps to kill American children in the womb and actively kills Iraqi and Pashtun children on the ground, even Catholic researchers accept money from government agencies or private foundations which are also paying for research into such horrors as human cloning, even human-animal hybrid cloning, but we tell ourselves we can remain above that. We’re part of the system but the evil work is being done in the lab down the hallway and we never go past that doorway into that evil place.

Our bluff has been called. Satan has come to claim our souls and Daniel Webster doesn’t seem to be near to rescue us by verbal trickery. The government is saying, more or less, “You’re on our payroll and you’re accepting our money for chemotherapy. You have to be good, loyal citizens and participate in abortions as well.” We object.

The devil might own our souls but, “Damn it, we have our pride and our integrity. We have a claim to a spot in Heaven even if we’ve sold our souls to the devil.”

Evil may be brought under some control for a short while. The Church may recover and begin to grown again. But this recovery can come only when Christians are willing to suffer, even to accept painful and degrading deaths, rather than accept the gifts of an increasingly evil medical system, rather than to accept the gifts of an increasingly evil government.

Christ suffered to save us and gave us no other way to defeat evil than to suffer along with Him. Yet, even before we suffer to save others, we have to remember the simple common-sense rule:

If you don’t wish the Principalities of this world to make a claim on your soul, don’t accept their gifts and don’t let yourself become dependent upon them.

Where the Political and the Moral Part Company

We bring our moral order or moral disorder with us into the political sphere, a region in which a healthy people would spend only a small part of their lives. Our moral natures are shaped in our communities and not even in our town-halls let alone in that state capitol 75 miles down the turnpike from where I sit. God help us if we start believing that we should expect or want any moral guidance from that other capitol 500 miles away from where I sit, so accessible by way of the interstate highway built for military mobility and so useful for destroying local moral order, the only sort of moral order possible to flesh-and-blood human beings.

This is the truth that underlies the semi-truth, “You can’t legislate morality.” That statement is wrong in that sense that a morally well-ordered society will have moral legislation which will be binding upon morally disordered people and those who are moral as a matter of convention as well as those who are morally well-ordered in a deeper and more substantial sense. But we have to remember two constraints upon moral activity in the political sphere:

1. Political means can’t build the consensus which can produce a morally well-ordered society.

2. As you ascend to higher levels of political abstraction, to greater centralization of power — however little or great, less and less agreement is possible amongst the various communities and political associations of communities with their various ways of life.

In fact, it’s unlikely that an overly complex society, actually a complex of communities, can build much of a consensus for more than the most basic issues. In saying this, I’m not even speaking of a society which has a substantial minority or majority of those whose moral ordering is less than complete or even outright deformed. A society which is really a collective of several morally well-ordered societies won’t be able to arrive at a consensus of customs and laws because those would be different for an Orthodox Jewish society and for a Mennonite society and still different again for Ukrainian Catholics.

Hard Times: Our Last Best Hope for Survival

In this insightful article, The Big One is Nigh, Srdja Trifkovic provides some sobering analysis, including this statement:

If reasonable men agree that our civilization is spiritually diseased, morally rotten and demographically moribund, then a colossal, rapidly spreading global economic crisis should be neither feared nor wished away. It may yet be our last best hope for survival.

I would quibble about the fear, but I imagine he was advocating the conquest of normal fear of terrible likelihoods and not really the absence of fear. Fear is natural because many of us will at least go hungry and have to learn to live with cold houses or dangerous streets even in our nicest towns. We may face far worse than that, such as loss of many American soldiers during a bloody retreat from Asia or increased disease rates as our food runs short and our sanitation systems decay.

We have a need for prudence properly understood, that is, “the exercise of sound judgment in practical affairs” and not “the vice of cowardice”. Prudence can guide us to the virtuous way to proceed. Having done that, we proceed, step by step, avoiding unnecessary danger but not retreating or moving aside in a cowardly way. If necessary, we keep our eyes on the ground just in front of our feet and not on the vaguely seen horrors which lie ahead or to the side. For many, this prudential analysis may simply mean that they choose their leaders as best as possible and then follow those leaders into the desert if necessary. After all, God called Abram and expected others to follow. He called the retainers and servants of Abram through their leader.

We modern Americans, and other citizens of the West, tend to decide what risks we’re willing to take on and then to set the best and most moral course within the boundaries set by our desire to be as safe and comfortable as possible. We must learn to put what’s right first. Considerations of safety and prosperity should be secondary.

You Hammer the Nail in His Hands and I’ll Hammer the Nail in His Feet

We have one candidate, Barack Obama, who advocates the dismemberment of babies as they leave the womb (partial-birth abortion). We have another candidate, John McCain, who thinks it funny to sing, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” to the tune of that old Beach Boy hit, Barbara Ann. To be sure, Obama is quite willing to send soldiers to die in many desert where Americans have no business being though he has shown some signs of seeing that Iraq is a disaster of some serious magnitude. That perhaps makes Obama the better all-round advocate of murdering innocent human beings.

What confuses me is the apparent belief on the part of Christians who support either Obama or McCain that it’s possible to bang nails into Christ’s wrists while pretending to remain loyal to Him by refusing to bang nails into His feet. Or vice versa.

I do understand the need some feel, or at least temptation they feel, to vote for what seems the lesser of two evils, but we Christians insult Christ by ever claiming that Obama or McCain is any better than the lesser of two evils. If you must vote for either one, say a prayer first to ask for God’s forgiveness.

The End of Illusions About Democracy?

There’s no magic about democracy. Merely having formal democratic procedures gains you nothing but a more vulgarized class of political exploiters. Political machines will use those procedures, at least when they decay into populism, to gain control of the electoral processes that they might use governments to provide services for their clients. Honest, courageous politicians will be few and far between since the machines will have a strong incentive to weed out any possible candidates who have moral integrity. For what it’s worth, this was and is my main reason for a strong skepticism about Governor Palin — I have confidence the Republican Party bureaucracy wouldn’t have allowed her to be chosen unless they already owned her soul or knew it was up for sale for a price they were willing to pay.

When democracy, or any other system, works, it’s because of men like George Washington who are willing to take a moral stand and worry about the consequences afterwards and a Washington will succeed only if men of lesser stature but significant moral integrity are willing to follow him.

The moral integrity which can found a good polity, democracy or other, consists of a willingness to give life or fortune to do what’s right. Americans, and nearly all those of the modern West, are far more likely to decide before hand how they wish to live and then to look at the possible moral stances they can take. When we make our decisions in this way, most of us will naturally choose a prosperous and orderly life, unless we’re in that small band who need danger. This is why we need to take the first step with our moral foot rather than our calculating foot. If we’re lucky, we can do what’s right and also be blessed with a prosperous and orderly life, but we can’t assume such.

Somewhere, Mark Twain pointed out that Americans, given a choice, don’t really choose to engage in activities that might be a part of any Heaven conceivable under Christian beliefs. In the context of his work, he was speaking of a more general belief that Americans talk a good moral talk but make their major decisions on the basis of self-interest. Those who know much about Mark Twain know his main moral allergies were set off by the middle-class who choose their moral rules according to the amount of support they give to a safe, comfortable life. Sins are allowed so long as they don’t endanger safety, comfort, and middle-class respectability. In other words, Mark Twain was talking the sort of fellow who could be very upset about teenage promiscuity and abortion in the United States and would also support the use of criminal military technology such as napalm against other human beings, even civilian populations. Such a man is more interested in maintaining property values than he is in serving God and man. Such a man is more interested in bourgeois respectability than he is in carrying his cross. Modern democracies seem to have produced masses of such creatures who are usually pleasant and neighborly while being morally stunted, at least by Christian standards.

Does democracy really nurture such men, encouraging them to become the sorts of cowards who place no value on any state that might be truly labeled ‘freedom’ because such a state carries risks of suffering or at least lack of luxuries? Does democracy merely allow such men to reveal themselves as such? Is the real problem the sort of populist democracy favored in the modern West, a democracy which sighed in relief when moral giants such as George Washington grew old and gave up power? “Now, we can choose the sorts of self-serving scoundrels who will flatter and bribe.”

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Who engaged in the orgy of profiteering that led to the gutting of our banking industry, our construction and real-estate industries, perhaps our insurance industry, and even much of our manufacturing industry?

Us.

Who has taught many peoples about the globe to hate and fear the United States and its citizens when those peoples mostly admired us and mostly trusted us not so many years ago?

Us.

Who unleashed the corporations who did so much to corrupt our children and our own selves with truly mind-numbing and perverse entertainment?

Us.

We have met the enemy and he is us. And he looks like an ugly and cowardly beast in that mirror.

Let’s stop talking about democracy as if it were a primary good and start talking about moral integrity. It might be an embarrassing and humbling conversation, but it might also be the beginning of a cleansing of American souls and slso our public squares.

What’s the Point of It All?

Some more good news on stem-cell research, but all is not well. An honest researcher points out a fact which is inconvenient for those of us who think one human being should never be used as the means to the end of another human being.

In Twenty Disease-specific Stem Cell Lines Created, we read:

Harvard Stem Cell Institute researcher George Q. Daley, MD, PhD, also associate director of the Stem Cell Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, and HSCI colleagues Konrad Hochedlinger and Chad Cowan have produced a robust new collection of disease-specific stem cell lines, all of which were developed using the new induced pluripotent stem cell (iPS) technique.

The new iPS lines, developed from the cells of patients ranging in age from one month to 57-years-old and suffering from a range of conditions from Down Syndrome to Parkinson’s disease, will be deposited in a new HSCI “core” facility being established at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), HSCI co-director Doug Melton announced yesterday. The operations of the iPS Core will be overseen by a faculty committee, which Daley will chair.

Later in the article, we read:

While Daley, President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, is enthusiastic about the promise of reprogramming studies, he is far from ready to abandon experiments with embryonic stem cells. Daley believes that reprogramming and ESC research must advance in tandem to bring cell therapy to the clinic as quickly as possible.

Christians have fallen over each other in the recent past to justify good and moral uses of stem-cell technology so long as we might solve our medical problems and might be relieved of the responsibility for moral witness. In this article, I’ll not discuss the moral error in using any human being (including babies murdered years ago) as the means to the ends of other human beings. (See What is Stem Cell Research Really About and Are All Scientists Evil? and Human Cloning: Legal/Ethical Flux for such arguments.)

We can’t live forever. We can’t solve all medical problems anymore than we can stop earthquakes or volcanoes. We do what we can to help ourselves and others, especially the children, but we do no good by sacrificing our moral integrity, by growing or making things which might well be evil and putting them in our bodies or the bodies of children.

We Christians proclaim a belief in a resurrection into life without end as the companions to our Lord Jesus Christ and yet we make no serious protests against a society that sets its goals to maximize life-span and comfort and material prosperity, considering moral preferences — truths would be too strong a word for our views — only as secondary matters. True Christians would decide to live in recognition of moral truths, to live in such a way that we would nurture our love of God and our human moral integrity first and try to lengthen our lives or ease our sufferings as a secondary matter.

Corporate Laws: Not in Our Genes and Not in the Bible

There is no verse in the Bible that says:

Thou shalt extend human political and economic rights to corporate entities with abstract ownership that freedom and prosperity might spread through the land.

Nor do we have any reasons from genetics or evolutionary biology to believe that human beings function well as cogs in large corporate entities, either private or public. The nice middle-class Germans who actually did the work for the Nazis (building railroads and running military manufacturing and logistics and so forth) were not forthrightly evil as were Hitler and Himmler, but they ignored the larger effects of their work and kept busy in pursuing their modest career goals that they might be respectable citizens paying their taxes and adding to their children’s college funds. (See Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil for an accessible analysis of the situation in light of Eichmann’s trial and Professor Arendt’s efforts to deal with the ‘niceness’ of the man who was horrified by the Nazi programs but did his job of managing the logistics of the death-camps.)

For every exploiter who made his billions by selling American productive assets and jobs overseas, for every exploitive employer pushing the ‘liberal’ cause of open immigration programs which has been justly labeled as ‘quasi-slavery’ by some commentators, there were not only armies of naive and well-intentioned activists for the global economy but also armies of well-behaved widgets who handled the details of those programs even to the point, in many cases, of selling their own jobs overseas or training their own cheaply-paid immigrant replacements.

The marketplaces of the modern world are morally unstructured because those vast places can only be inhabited by mobs of human beings, not human beings organized into local communities that reflect, poorly or badly, the needs of very concrete family- and community-centered creatures. A mob of human beings moves as such. Not generally rebellious, these marketplaces mobs are docile, moving to build the railway lines to carry their Jewish neighbors towards the east, staffing the planning and operations departments of corporations which provide huge bonuses for executives and bloated dividends for retirement funds by selling American productive assets and jobs overseas. But what are those people to do?

Capitalism can take many forms, including forms which allow families and local communities a large role, but as for corporate capitalism…

Can no one see that huge, centralized structures don’t meet the moral needs nor the moral capabilities of those very specific creatures — human beings? The economic man assumed by the theoreticians and practitioners of corporate capitalism doesn’t exist and never did exist. He bears no resemblance to the concrete man described by evolutionary science, genetics, psychology, and the better-quality novels. Try to justify our current economic system on the basis of any of the writings of Jane Austen or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Hermann Melville or Henry James or V. S. Naipaul. It would be the same problem as trying to justify our current economic system on the results of sociobiology or neurobiology, both of which paint images of man not so different than those painted by our better novelists as well as the Bible. And this is an image of man not suited for life in the modern marketplaces, not capable of living a morally well-structured life in these marketplaces.

Why the Rush to Implement Nanotechnology?

Nanotechnology which uses tiny, man-made particles is already being used heavily, especially in the electronics industry, but it would seem that many branches of industry, including medicine, are starting to deploy nanotechnologies. There’s lots of information available on the Internet or in popular science magazines for those who wish to pursue the subject. I merely wish to raise the point that we’ve worked our collective selves into a mental state akin to an optimistic fatalism. If something is possible and bears the promise of some good results, we assume it will be done, it must be done. We sometimes consider the possible downside risks but mostly in a cursory manner. This remains true even as we deal with the fallout from the deployment of previous technologies. Those problems include a variety of problems: technological, political, social, and economic.

Now we’re developing nanotechnology in which molecules and atoms are manipulated into forms they wouldn’t be likely to take on in nature. This can be very good but there’s also a likelihood that some anticipated and unanticipated dangers will be realized. The dangers might be small, but what is the reason to rush in implementing this technology that we risk the possibility of serious damage to the environment or to human health?

Some scientists are beginning to realize there might be problems. These two stories, Unknown risks Safety of nanotechnology products is no small concern and Nanoparticles In Sewage Could Escape Into Bodies Of Water, give some background on some possible problems.

Why the rush to implement technologies when we’re just starting to learn the problems which we need to avoid or at least mitigate?