Oh, God! -- From Brio Magazine, it's Ask Suzie! ...
Dear Susie: Brio gives me comfort and conviction in my relationship with Christ, and I'm so grateful for that! However there's one element that's bothering me. I have many non-Christian friends, and it frustrates me that you say they're sinners. Does that mean there will be billions of people who will be going to hell? This is such a bothersome thought to me, and I have difficulty believing it.
I've invited my friends to church and offered them the New Testament, but they say they want to maintain their own respected religions (Judaism, Islam, etc.). These friends give so much to the community, possess sound morals and are genuinely good people. It saddens me to think they're going to hell. Is this really true, or am I worrying for nothing?
Saddened From our e-mail bag
Suzie's answer will make you rage with loathing for God. Let's hope Saddened's healthy moral sense pulls her out of this vicious nonsense. Enjoy!
Pancake Mountain! -- How is it possible that I was unaware of Pancake Mountain, a prototype of a surreal children's show featuring Ian MacKaye, Bob Mould, Thievery, Uncalled4 (a swell go go band, for you people who live in an actual state) and other "famous for DC" types? Do check out MacKaye's new endeavor, the Evens, performing "Vowel Movement" and Anti-Flag doing a quite rousing version of the Pancake Mountain theme song. Who wouldn't expose their children to luddish, anti-corporate propaganda if the music was this good? If Captain Planet had cameos by, say, Chuck Brown, I'd tune in.
And of course one should be honest. A big part of the notion here is a nefarious leftwing scheme that hopes to use mandatory service as a mechanism for producing social interaction across class, regional, and ethnic lines so as to produce a more solidaristic generation. The thought, both mobility-wise and solidarity-wise, is that the "greatest generation" of conscripts built a nice, relatively egalitarian, middle-class society on the backs of GI Bill benefits and a general sense of social cohension.* Of course, they had an apocalyptic war to create the need for conscription and we do not. Nevertheless, through a sick millenial perversion I (and others like me), believe the positive externalities of conscription justify re-implementing it anyway.
Unfortunately, I guess Matt is being facetious about "sick millenial perversion." But there is indeed something, um, unwell, about Matt's thought here. I have grave doubts about his empirical claims about the potential net benefits from conscription, but I'll set them aside. What really offends against liberal sensibility is that Matt is clearly unimpressed by the fact that concription systematically denies entire classes of people their liberty and autonomy, and blithely assumes that this sort of mass revocation of fundamental rights may be justified by a balance of positive externalities. To make matters worse, the thing that makes Matt's externalities "positive" do not seem to be neutral to competing conceptions of the political good. No doubt Matt has a special penchant for "solidarity" and "relatively egalitarian" societies, as do "others like him." But it is distinctly illiberal to use state power with the specific design of inculcating a pet conception of the political good. And it is massively, DIZZYINGLY, illiberal to use state power to systematically strip citizens of their basic liberties in order to promote pet political values.
I can imagine positive externalities that might ensue from a policy of identifying and preemptively imprisoning teenage boys statistically most likely to later commit crimes and disturb the peace. Should we do it? Matt's proposal is morally no better, and probably much worse.
The assumption that the free market and political democracy go naturally together was always pretty dubious, and fascism is one dramatic refutation of it. But we might now be moving deeper into a world where the two go together like a horse and cabbage.
Now, the first sentence is a bit hazy on the meaning of "go naturally together." If Eagleton means "are rather often found together," there's nothing dubious about this. I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but I do remember seeing numbers somewhere that showed a strong correlation between liberal democracy and capitalism. The question is blurred by the fact that there's no universal agreement on the right way to use these words, but I take it that the liberal democracy/free-ish markets correlation is fairly conventional wisdom.
It's clear, at least, that the sort of "democracy" where voters are frogmarched to the ballot-box to cast their vote for the resident autocrat tends not to be congenial to free markets. And we should probably expect a fully populist sort of democracy to feature plenty of redistribution from losing coalitions to winning coalitions, especially if the minority happens to dominates the market. (And we should also, I take it, expect violence in these cases. To put it in Scanlonian language, market dominant minorities have a "reason to reject" a system of principles that allows expropriation based simpy on numerical superiority, and they often express their rejection in not entirely peaceful terms.) So, yes, markets and democracy, per se, are not by their essence complements, like punch and pie.
But, according to one sort of bourgeois liberalism, there is a deep logical-normative relationship between free markets and democracy. Suppose we take it for granted that it's better for people to realize their reasonable ends than to not realize them, and that there is such a thing as cooperation to mutual advantage, i.e., interaction by which the interested parties jointly advance their ends. In general, the best piece of evidence that an interaction is mutually advantageous is that the parties to the interaction have each agreed to its terms and have carried them out. If somebody had to be forced to agreement, or to compliance with it, that's evidence that it's not really mutually advantageous. Which means that somebody's ends are being frustrated, which is a bad thing. So unless we can't avoid it, the unanimity rule should prevail as our favored principle for collective decision.
Anything less than unanimity tempts noncompliance by the overruled, which may in turn necessitate coercive means for gaining compliance, which, aside from moral qualms about coercion, is also expensive to those who have to pay for the mechanisms of force. Other things being equal, it's better to get things done voluntarily and cheaply rather than coercively and expensively. Does it require saying that, in general (negative externalities aside), the market is a system of unanimous decision, i.e., cooperation to mutual advantage? Yes, I suppose it does.
Alas, there are collective action problems and public goods, and so we often need some mechanisms of coercion and public finance to best facilitate a general system of mutual advantage. How are we decide how to implement these? If unanimity is required, everyone has a veto. But someone always stands to lose relative to any particular coercive policy. So we need a decision rule short of unanimity. That is, we need some kind of majoritarian, or extra-majoritarian democratic principle. And each of us can see that this will be to our benefit. We might lose in certain cases, but we will win overall, assuming the system's a good one. Now, which system of collective decision principles, and which structure of public roles and institutions will best constrain and control the use of state coercion and facilitate an overall system of cooperation to mutual advantage is a damn hard problem. But it remains that the point of such a system just is to facilitate such cooperation, and to help us achieve our ends in concert with others.
So it seems that the logic that governs the market is also likely to deliver democracy. Moreover, it is likely to deliver a democratic structure that will tend to minimize the ability of the ambitious to dominate the means of coercion in the manner characteristic of a fascist state. The generally negative-sum struggle for fascist state power is diametrically opposed to the positive-sum logic of cooperation that is the very heart of capitalism, and the justification of democracy.
e-mail: flybottle -at- willwilkinson -dot- net
