The Free Thinker

Thirteenth-Century Flower Child

It's a shame that in a review of G.K. Chesterton's gem of a book, St. Francis of Assisi, I am obliged to stop for a moment to answer a certain obscene passage in which he writes, slyly, underhandedly, euphemistically, a blank check to who knows what tortures and murders in the name of religion, which he calls "fighting for what you believe in."  He has to go rather out of his way to do it, since in neither the life of St. Francis nor in the life of his Model and Master is there the slightest hint of condoning such goings-on.  It would pleasanter to say nothing about it at all, but liberty requires vigilance, and if we are not to throw in jail men who let words slip from their pens which, if taken seriously, would amount to declarations of provisional war against free societies to compel the submission of heretics to the Church of Rome, war to be initiated, presumably, if and whenever they have enough power to do so, we must at least take a moment to condemn such notions whenever they appear, lest someone get the idea that they are not only legally tolerated, but socially and morally tolerable.  Chesterton is a clever writer and can be brilliant in making the just cause appear the unjust when he chooses to do so, yet in this case the truth is so plain that I suspect that here there are few readers whom even he manages to confuse.  For there is, of course, a difference between "fighting for what you believe in," in the sense of fighting for the right to profess what you believe, and fighting to compel someone else to deny what he believes and/or profess what he disbelieves.  The former is perhaps sometimes right, though it is worth noting that Jesus Christ did not even do that.  The latter is always, everywhere, and utterly wrong, and Chesterton, a 19th/20th-century Englishman living in a society that took tolerance for granted, probably knew that as well as you and me.  I doubt he really wanted to drive a sword through his atheist acquaintances.  His anti-modern bigotry is like an American suburban teenager wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt: he gets a contrarian buzz out of being on the other side.  That he was probably insincere is the best defense there can be of Chesterton on this point.  Most of the anti-modern bigotry in St. Francis of Assisi is silly but harmless, a small price to pay for the ecstasy of reading so much of the book, but the few passages in which he blusters in defense of inquisitions are really wicked, because it is such stumbling-blocks that make good men conclude sadly that Christianity, for all its beauty and noble aspirations, is in the end a bad thing that must be rejected and condemned.  Which would be exactly right and proper, if that really were Christianity.

Given that Chesterton can't seem to write a single book without condoning crimes, why do I bother to read him at all?  It was not, in this case, because of his prodigious talent, his delicious eloquence, his considerable erudition and imaginative sense for history, his ability to bring a theme to life a hundred times more inspiringly, more illuminatingly, more entertainingly, than the typical hagiographer, who more or less just recites the facts.  It was not because Chesterton is a sumptuous banquet next to the mere bread of most "Lives of the Saints."  It was simply because I wanted to read about St. Francis, and Chesterton's was the only biography I could find in audiobook.  I was, perhaps, a little glad that it gave me an excuse to read him.  Were any other biography available, I would have felt obliged to buy it in preference to Chesterton's, knowing that Chesterton is not quite appropriate for devotional reading.

Lives of the saints is the most fitting of themes, and was once one of the major genres of literature.  It ought to be still.  I've noticed that whereas reading the lives of the saints makes me feel joyful and inspired, other biographies-- of politicians, or economists, or artists-- usually sadden me.  The Christian doctrine that we all must end in either the beatific or the miserific state seems to have intimations even in this life. 

There are some lives that seem like gradual, sometimes tortuous, ascensions into light, lives punctuated by falls, failing, and failures which, however, are transformed by some twist of fate or some moment of enlightenment into jokes or joys, lives that may grow less comprehensible, more strange and remote near the end, perhaps merely because they have less time to tell us about the last things, yet as if the person is beginning a new journey, so that death is like the pages torn out of a novel one was desperate to read the end of, lives which leave behind a sadness, more poignant because alloyed with joy, and a wistful love that wishes to follow them, and one regrets that the waywardness of one's mind will prevent you from contemplating the life as long and as devoutly as you would like to, and it is easy to understand why people might treasure every relic or anecdote long afterwards.  There are other lives that seem to unravel in frustration and futility; lives animated by virtues, perhaps great virtues, with early promise and splendid possibilities, with schemes and dreams, the beginnings of adventures and quests and grand designs, yet where the mistakes loom with lengthening shadows, and the years become a shrinking, a narrowing into tedium and quiet desperation, as what in youth were real virtues become habits kept up from pride at an ever-increasing toll in effort; and at last, when they trail off irrelevantly into death, one must suppress a shudder. 

I am not saying that I know, merely from reading his biography, whether a man is saved or damned.  It is the story, not the man, which points one way or the other, and human biography might well miss the point of the real story of a man's life.  A life apparently of service and sanctity may mask a gnawing demon of pride that destroyed a man from within; or decades of frustration and failure may have been blown away like dust before the wind of an eleventh-hour rejuvenation and reawakening.  The proverbial "eleventh hour," of course, is an allusion to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard: those who were hired at the eleventh hour received the same payment as those who worked from the first hour of the day.  Anyway, it is the happy, edifying stories, the stories that shine and not those that shudder, that are worth telling.  Actually, a lot of modern literature is a sort of fictional hagiography, an author showing, through a model or figure, what he thinks is the right way to live.  That is fine, I think, but it would be nice if a more deliberate and historically-minded hagiography were practiced, too.

St. Francis of Assisi is the most beautiful book by Chesterton that I have read, and I am almost inclined in the enthusiasm of the moment to say that in some passages it is the most beautiful prose I have ever read in my life, though in truth the feat of memory involved in supporting such a claim is far beyond my capacity.  St. Francis reminds me of the 1960s, for example of a song indirectly named after him: "Are you going to San Francisco? Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. In the streets of San Francisco, you're gonna meet some gentle people there..."  The term "flower child" is, indeed, very apt for a man who saw flowers and birds and fire and water as his sisters and brothers, who believed, in John Denver's words, that "the children and the flowers are my sisters and my brothers," and the Franciscans were like hippies, turning their backs on bourgeois values, wandering, happy, free.  St. Francis imitated the life of Jesus and there is perhaps no better example of living out the teachings of the Gospel, including the radical poverty-- do not worry about what you will wear, nor about what you will eat-- and the love of enemies.  Chesterton thinks that he was a dawn, a new childhood, of a world at last cleansed from the demons-- "this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting"-- of paganism.  I was reminded of the historic role of the 1960s hippes, of the sublime forgetfulness of a generation that knew nothing of the titanic struggles that had scarred their parents and knew a joy of living that had been half-lost amidst the noble struggles against Nazism and communism.  St. Francis had all that was good in the hippies without the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, and that is perhaps the best approach that I, no Chesterton, can give to the feelings of wonder and gratitude that flow from almost every page of Chesterton's book.

Pity about the bad parts.  I feel a vague regret that there isn't some body of wise, responsible, good men who would read books before they were published and blot out certain iniquitous passages which violate all norms of ordinary decency, to prevent them from marring otherwise worthy works.  I recognize the irony of the wish.

Thirteenth-Century Flower Child

It's a shame that in a review of G.K. Chesterton's gem of a book, St. Francis of Assisi, I am obliged to stop for a moment to answer a certain obscene passage in which he writes, slyly, underhandedly, euphemistically, a blank check to who knows what tortures and murders in the name of religion, which he calls "fighting for what you believe in."  He has to go rather out of his way to do it, since in neither the life of St. Francis nor in the life of his Model and Master is there the slightest hint of condoning such goings-on.  It would pleasanter to say nothing about it at all, but liberty requires vigilance, and if we are not to throw in jail men who let words slip from their pens which, if taken seriously, would amount to declarations of provisional war against free societies to compel the submission of heretics to the Church of Rome, war to be initiated, presumably, if and whenever they have enough power to do so, we must at least take a moment to condemn such notions whenever they appear, lest someone get the idea that they are not only legally tolerated, but socially and morally tolerable.  Chesterton is a clever writer and can be brilliant in making the just cause appear the unjust when he chooses to do so, yet in this case the truth is so plain that I suspect that here there are few readers whom even he manages to confuse.  For there is, of course, a difference between "fighting for what you believe in," in the sense of fighting for the right to profess what you believe, and fighting to compel someone else to deny what he believes and/or profess what he disbelieves.  The former is perhaps sometimes right, though it is worth noting that Jesus Christ did not even do that.  The latter is always, everywhere, and utterly wrong, and Chesterton, a 19th/20th-century Englishman living in a society that took tolerance for granted, probably knew that as well as you and me.  I doubt he really wanted to drive a sword through his atheist acquaintances.  His anti-modern bigotry is like an American suburban teenager wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt: he gets a contrarian buzz out of being on the other side.  That he was probably insincere is the best defense there can be of Chesterton on this point.  Most of the anti-modern bigotry in St. Francis of Assisi is silly but harmless, a small price to pay for the ecstasy of reading so much of the book, but the few passages in which he blusters in defense of inquisitions are really wicked, because it is such stumbling-blocks that make good men conclude sadly that Christianity, for all its beauty and noble aspirations, is in the end a bad thing that must be rejected and condemned.  Which would be exactly right and proper, if that really were Christianity.

Given that Chesterton can't seem to write a single book without condoning crimes, why do I bother to read him at all?  It was not, in this case, because of his prodigious talent, his delicious eloquence, his considerable erudition and imaginative sense for history, his ability to bring a theme to life a hundred times more inspiringly, more illuminatingly, more entertainingly, than the typical hagiographer, who more or less just recites the facts.  It was not because Chesterton is a sumptuous banquet next to the mere bread of most "Lives of the Saints."  It was simply because I wanted to read about St. Francis, and Chesterton's was the only biography I could find in audiobook.  I was, perhaps, a little glad that it gave me an excuse to read him.  Were any other biography available, I would have felt obliged to buy it in preference to Chesterton's, knowing that Chesterton is not quite appropriate for devotional reading.

Lives of the saints is the most fitting of themes, and was once one of the major genres of literature.  It ought to be still.  I've noticed that whereas reading the lives of the saints makes me feel joyful and inspired, other biographies-- of politicians, or economists, or artists-- usually sadden me.  The Christian doctrine that we all must end in either the beatific or the miserific state seems to have intimations even in this life. 

There are some lives that seem like gradual, sometimes tortuous, ascensions into light, lives punctuated by falls, failing, and failures which, however, are transformed by some twist of fate or some moment of enlightenment into jokes or joys, lives that may grow less comprehensible, more strange and remote near the end, perhaps merely because they have less time to tell us about the last things, yet as if the person is beginning a new journey, so that death is like the pages torn out of a novel one was desperate to read the end of, lives which leave behind a sadness, more poignant because alloyed with joy, and a wistful love that wishes to follow them, and one regrets that the waywardness of one's mind will prevent you from contemplating the life as long and as devoutly as you would like to, and it is easy to understand why people might treasure every relic or anecdote long afterwards.  There are other lives that seem to unravel in frustration and futility; lives animated by virtues, perhaps great virtues, with early promise and splendid possibilities, with schemes and dreams, the beginnings of adventures and quests and grand designs, yet where the mistakes loom with lengthening shadows, and the years become a shrinking, a narrowing into tedium and quiet desperation, as what in youth were real virtues become habits kept up from pride at an ever-increasing toll in effort; and at last, when they trail off irrelevantly into death, one must suppress a shudder. 

I am not saying that I know, merely from reading his biography, whether a man is saved or damned.  It is the story, not the man, which points one way or the other, and human biography might well miss the point of the real story of a man's life.  A life apparently of service and sanctity may mask a gnawing demon of pride that destroyed a man from within; or decades of frustration and failure may have been blown away like dust before the wind of an eleventh-hour rejuvenation and reawakening.  The proverbial "eleventh hour," of course, is an allusion to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard: those who were hired at the eleventh hour received the same payment as those who worked from the first hour of the day.  Anyway, it is the happy, edifying stories, the stories that shine and not those that shudder, that are worth telling.  Actually, a lot of modern literature is a sort of fictional hagiography, an author showing, through a model or figure, what he thinks is the right way to live.  That is fine, I think, but it would be nice if a more deliberate and historically-minded hagiography were practiced, too.

St. Francis of Assisi is the most beautiful book by Chesterton that I have read, and I am almost inclined in the enthusiasm of the moment to say that in some passages it is the most beautiful prose I have ever read in my life, though in truth the feat of memory involved in supporting such a claim is far beyond my capacity.  St. Francis reminds me of the 1960s, for example of a song indirectly named after him: "Are you going to San Francisco? Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. In the streets of San Francisco, you're gonna meet some gentle people there..."  The term "flower child" is, indeed, very apt for a man who saw flowers and birds and fire and water as his sisters and brothers, who believed, in John Denver's words, that "the children and the flowers are my sisters and my brothers," and the Franciscans were like hippies, turning their backs on bourgeois values, wandering, happy, free.  St. Francis imitated the life of Jesus and there is perhaps no better example of living out the teachings of the Gospel, including the radical poverty-- do not worry about what you will wear, nor about what you will eat-- and the love of enemies.  Chesterton thinks that he was a dawn, a new childhood, of a world at last cleansed from the demons-- "this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting"-- of paganism.  I was reminded of the historic role of the 1960s hippes, of the sublime forgetfulness of a generation that knew nothing of the titanic struggles that had scarred their parents and knew a joy of living that had been half-lost amidst the noble struggles against Nazism and communism.  St. Francis had all that was good in the hippies without the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, and that is perhaps the best approach that I, no Chesterton, can give to the feelings of wonder and gratitude that flow from almost every page of Chesterton's book.

Pity about the bad parts.  I feel a vague regret that there isn't some body of wise, responsible, good men who would read books before they were published and blot out certain iniquitous passages which violate all norms of ordinary decency, to prevent them from marring otherwise worthy works.  I recognize the irony of the wish.

Free Trader

McCain to Hit Hard on Free Trade in Hard-Hit Town (USA Today)

THOMASVILLE, Ala. — Sen. John McCain heads for a battleground of the free-trade fight today.

Youngstown, Ohio, is a struggling steel town where jobs have been lost and free-trade deals are unpopular.

McCain, however, is prepared to argue the overall benefits of unfettered trade, aides said. "Protectionism devastates the economy," said Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to McCain.

In an economic speech last week, McCain said: "When new trading partners can sell in our market, and American companies can sell in theirs, the gains are great and they are lasting."

I wonder: has any presidential candidate in the last thirty years been such a white knight on trade?  I thought McCain's idea of suspending the gas tax during the summer was misguided pandering, but maybe he's saving his strength for the battles that really matter.

Economics, Theology, and the Is/Ought Distinction

I thought of another parallel between medieval theology and postmodern economics: each is the primary bridge between is and ought for public purposes.  The is-ought problem, famously raised by David Hume, is the problem that it is not obvious how one can get from statements about how the world is to how it ought to be.  MacIntyre discusses the is-ought problem in After Virtue:

To answer this question it is helpful to consider another type of counter-example to the 'No "ought" conclusions from "is" premises' thesis.  From such factual premises as 'This watch is grossly inaccurate and irregular in time-keeping' and 'This watch is too heavy to carry about comfortably', the evaluative conclusion validly follows that 'This is a bad watch.'  From such factual premises as 'He gets a better yield for this crop per acre than any farmer in the district', 'He has the most effective programme of soil renewal yet known' and 'His dairy herd wins all the first prizes at the agricultural shows', the evaluative conclusion follows that 'He is a good farmer.'

Both of these arguments are valid because of the special character of the concepts of a watch and of a farmer. Such concepts are functional concepts, that is to say, we define both 'watch' and 'farmer' in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are characteristically expected to serve.  It follows that the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch nor the concept of a farmer from that of a good farmer... (After Virtue, p. 58)

As far as I understand, this is MacIntyre's answer to the is-ought problem; if we then regard man as a functional concept, then a concept of a good man and a morality may follow from that, hence the importance, for MacIntyre, of the Aristotelian concept of telos.  But what is man's function?  In After Virtue he arrives at this rather unsatisfying conclusion: "the good life for man is to be spent in seeking the good life for man..." (p. 219)  The agnostic circularity, the feeble and Sisyphean quality of this conclusion, presumably would not afflict the medievals, who would, I suppose, say that the good life for man is to be spent in glorifying God, but that still seems a funny starting-place for morality, since right and wrong are obvious facts of life to everybody-- as C.S. Lewis observes, we constantly exhibit them in our habit of quarreling, which is never mere "fighting like animals" but always involves claims of right-- while the ideas of God, of praising God, and of why praising God is normative or desirable, are far more difficult, and I suspect very hard to appreciate for anyone who has not engaged in a good deal of moral effort already.

Anyway, theology was the medieval discipline which, par excellence, connected grand comprehensive theories about what the world is like-- "is"-- to prescriptive notions of how man ought to live-- "ought."  Economics does the same today: it develops "positive" law-like generalizations concerning human interaction (supply and demand) and derives "normative" conclusions about human welfare (e.g., Pareto-optimality, Kaldor-Hicks-improvement).  Welfare economics is not the only discipline to do so, of course, but it is the only one whose conclusions command general assent.  People differ on whether the rise of rock-n-roll, the decline or revival of churchgoing, the movement of women into the workplace, or even democracy is good or bad, but no one wants GDP to fall, because a higher GDP, roughly speaking, means that people can get more of whatever it is they want, at least in material/money-exchangeable terms, and probably no less of intangible/non-purchasable things they value.

Economics is, in a way, much more agnostic than theology.  It doesn't answer the question of the good life for man: it delegates it back to the individual.  Yet it still provides a source of real morality, even if economists aren't especially comfortable with the idea.  Hardly anyone would claim-- certainly it would be odd for a Christian to claim-- that helping people satisfy their own desires-- "doing unto others as they would have you do unto them," so to speak-- is irrelevant to morality.  If we can devise systems that do this, that may not be the good, but surely it's a good.  In a globalized world where consensus on religious grounds is not available, it's worthwhile to have some common standard to judge by.

Economics, Theology, and Legitimacy

In a recent post, The New Middle Ages, I suggested that there is a parallel between the role of theology in the Middle Ages and of economics in our ("postmodern?") times.  I read this in Eric Hobsbawm, and later in an interview with Robert Skidelsky, long before I was able to make sense of the idea myself.  Perhaps I can make it clearer than Hobsbawm and Skidelsky did.  What I write here is somewhat speculative: I'm trying to make sense of a large historical pattern.  Certainly it could be challenged.

Society needs people to behave themselve; economics and theology give them reasons to do so.  Not chiefly as academic disciplines: you don't need to know about indifference curves and the quantity theory of money to understand that if you spend more than you earn you'll go broke, and you don't need to master the arcana of the Trinity to understand that if you steal or kill, you'll go to hell.  Economic and religious motivations operate at the grass-roots level, but are affected in subtle yet powerful ways by macro movements like inflation or heresy.

The heresiarchs of postmodernity are first and foremost critics of the economic system: Marx most obviously, and Mao, Castro, etc. but Hitler too, who railed not only against the presumed-bourgeois Jews but explicitly against "the bourgeoisie."  And also a throng of Third World dictators.  Marx is modern, not postmodern, just as Arius, Pelagius and Nestorius were ancient, not medieval; but it is now, especially, that Marx is a heresiarch, because it is now that liberal democratic capitalism (with varying admixtures of welfare-state socialism) has become an orthodoxy.  Economic "heterodoxy" is so subversive, so able to evoke angst and fear, because if the security of property rights is overturned, the matrix of incentives that makes people behave themselves is destroyed. 

In the Middle Ages, rulers relied less on economic self-interest for social control, and more on people's obedience to God and fear of hell.  With life short and poor, with disorder frequent, with many wildernesses left for outlaws-- think Robin Hood and his Merry Men-- to escape to, temporal rulers' this-worldly sticks and carrots were weaker.  God-as-afterlife-enforcer was needed.

Now most people live to seventy years.  And public records are efficient enough that a criminal record will cast a shadow on your whole life.  And credit reports keep track of your debts.  There are enough this-worldly reasons to behave that we don't feel the need to rely on the threat of divine punishment to get people to obey the law-- provided we know how to keep the economy running all right.  I think that's at least part of the reason why economics has stepped into the role formerly played by theology as the chief intellectual ally of legitimacy.

Augustine and Patrick

Augustine of Hippo, 354-430, is regarded as "blessed" by the Orthodox Church and as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.  His Confessions is probably the most intimate book in all of ancient history, and has inspired Christians, I suppose, for a millennium and a half.  His stature tended to increase in the Middle Ages because during the few centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire there was such intellectual backsliding that Augustine's relative intellectual achievements were much greater.  In college, when I was much more Romantic, in the intellectual sense, than now, I was full of fiery indignation with Augustine for his resentment of sexuality, which he converted into a weird theo-biology of original sin, in which original sin is transmitted through the act of conception; this notion, as far as I understand, motivates the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (as distinct from the Virgin Birth, which is reported in the Gospels; since Mary is held by Christians to have been without sin, if original sin is transmitted through sexual conception, Mary too must have been immaculately conceived).  And yet, strangely-- poetic justice perhaps-- my life has come to have some parallels with Augustine's: amorous escapades of youth leading to disillusionment; a glittering intellectual career beckons before while a yearning to a simpler and more carefree life grows within me.  And a common vice too: the passion of argument often leads me to be unfair.

I would like to read The City of God.  I know myself and my time-management habits well enough to know that I could only "read" a book of that length as an audiobook, and I haven't been able to find it.  Hopefully it will appear one of these days.  Even the framing of the question-- "the city of God" versus "the city of man"-- evokes my admiration.

But.  The darkest chapter in Augustine's life is his persecution of the Donatists.  The Donatists were a group of heretics in North Africa-- notice the lack of "scare quotes," for I do think they were wrong-- which held that the sacraments were invalid if conducted by an unworthy priest.  It was a hot topic because many Christians had apostasized in the persecutions by the pagan emperors, and Christians who had remained faithful and suffered were sometimes reluctant to let their wayward brethren return when the persecutions ceased. The Donatist heresy was strong in North Africa.  Eventually imperial laws were passed against them.  The use of force against heretics was an innovation at that time: the Christians had only recently been in a position to do so.  Augustine justifies it in the Correction of the Donatists:

Whence it appears that great mercy is shown towards them, when by the force of those very imperial laws they are in the first instance rescued against their will from that sect in which, through the teaching of lying devils, they learned those evil doctrines, so that afterwards they might be made whole in the Catholic Church, becoming accustomed to the good teaching and example which they find in it.  For many of the men whom we now admire in the unity of Christ, for the pious fervor of their faith, and for their charity, give thanks to God with great joy that they are no longer in that error which led them to mistake those evil things for good,—which thanks they would not now be offering willingly, had they not first, even against their will, been severed from that impious association.

Now, the correct response to this is that the end does not justify the means.  But that starts to seem like a slender reed to lean on if one thinks the end very important-- and if the salvation of souls is at stake, it is.  What is pathetic about Augustine's persecution of the Donatists is that even in "realist" terms, so to speak, it was an act of supreme folly.  The whole of the Christian Roman Empire was on the verge of falling to pagan barbarians, and Augustine was wasting its waning strength on religious feuds. 

Fortunately, a better man than Augustine was then venturing beyond the borders of the civilized world to win by persuasion the souls of those who had once enslaved him, and St. Patrick's Ireland became a source of missionaries that helped create a medieval Christian civilization on the ruins of the fallen Roman Empire.

Augustine's North African city of Hippo is the modern Annaba, a city in Algeria, a country that is now 99% Muslim.  Algeria has not remained loyal to Augustine's Catholic faith, but at least it continues to practice Augustine's method of attaining religious unity.  St. Patrick's Ireland, meanwhile, is one of the most actively Catholic countries in Europe to this day, with Mass attendance at almost 50%.  It would, perhaps, be opportunistic to say that Ireland is Patrick's legacy, the symbol and the fruits of his life, as Algeria is Augustine's.  There have been too many twists and turns in history to make confident claims of causation.  And yet there is something miraculous about the light that burst from the west; and something strange and sad about the ease with thousands of miles of the southern Mediterranean collapsed before the Arab advance; and those somethings may indeed have much to do with the respective characters of Augustine and other persecuting hierarchs of late Rome, and that of the humble missionary, St. Patrick.  (Obviously, these thoughts were inspired by Thomas Cahill's book.)

Milton Friedman, Class Warrior

Milton Friedman's 1980 book, Free to Choose, is a libertarian call to action. I was recommended the book by someone who told me Friedman went beyond being a "technical economist" and adopted a more philosophical libertarianism. That's true, for better or worse. If one bears in mind the historical context-- published after the 1960s and 1970s, on the verge of the Reagan Revolution-- the book is thunderingly powerful. It is a philippic against the welfare state, and at the same presents what feels like an appealing and comprehensive alternative political philosophy.  Feels like, but probably isn't.  Anyway, you can't tell, because Friedman is guilty of an error that people who strongly believe something and want to make the case for it sometimes fall into: rather than discriminating between good and bad arguments and avoiding the latter, he comes at you with all of them at the same time, or in quick succession, creating an overwhelming effect at first, but ultimately weakening his case.  If Friedman just wanted to roll back welfare-state liberalism at the time, maybe it was the right approach.  If he wanted to make a lasting contribution, he undermined it.  (G.K. Chesterton does the same thing.  One is sometimes incredulous... Can he really be making that argument? Can he possibly fail to see that it will persuade readers of the opposite of what he is saying if they give it a moment's thought?)

To cite one example, at one point Friedman is arguing against seeking equality of outcome on the grounds of "fairness," and in particular against inheritance laws.  He points out: if it's unfair for children to inherit their parents' money, how is it fair for them to inherit good looks, or talent?  What's fair about Muhammad Ali, for example, being able to earn millions as a great fighter?  And yet if he were constrained to earn the same as everyone else, he surely wouldn't have endured the training to become a great fighter, and we'd all be deprived of the enjoyment of watching his fights.  OK, first, we could tax Muhammad Ali's income quite heavily and still probably leave him better off than his next best opportunity.  Second, inheritances are easier to tax than talent.  One might conclude: This is the great Milton Friedman, famed free-market advocate, and that's the best he can do? I guess inheritance taxes are a better idea than I thought.  (A better argument against inheritance taxes is that they discourage saving and maybe intra-family social capital.)

I'd say about half of Friedman's agenda has been adopted, more or less, since 1980, while other causes have become still more quixotic.  A reader today alternates between nodding complacently as he advocates a policy innovation that has become business-as-usual, and shaking one's head thinking, A great idea, but politically impossible.  Yet it seems in 1980, the political feasibility outlook for, say, vouchers and welfare reform, wasn't so different.  If welfare reform seemed impossible in 1980, maybe vouchers aren't impossible after all.

A striking feature of Free to Choose is how often and how effectively Friedman shows that statist policies are favoring the middle class at the expense of the poor.  State subsidies to higher education are state subsidies to the middle class.  The public school system, too, works to the great disadvantage of urban minorities, who end up in the worst schools with no way out.  Friedman inspires just anger against the teachers' unions who have pursued their own class interests by strangling the market solution to education which, more effectively than any other policy move, could open the door to a brighter future for disadvntaged urban minorities.  It is not the case, as a Marxist would say and a liberal might suspect, that Friedman opportunistically argues on pro-poor grounds for policies that he really supports because they benefit the bourgeoisie, nor even that Friedman uses pro-poor arguments ad hoc when they happen to coincide with his libertarian ideology.  The government really is a bourgeois racket to a larger extent than almost anyone realizes, and Friedman has a genuine social justice crusader's indignation at this and wants to roll it back.  What has happened since then might be summarized: the middle class has cherry-picked the libertarian agenda and gotten the parts that benefit them enacted, while the liberals use the poor symbolically and rhetorically, and anyway less often than before, to support big-government programs that don't really help them.  The poor are without influential advocates, and Milton Friedman the class warrior seems more quixotic than ever.

The New Middle Ages

Most writers who see fit to draw comparisons between the present day and the Middle Ages probably mean this as a critique of (bin Laden and) Bush, for the term "medieval" today has connotations of stupidity, cruelty, and fanaticism.  My attitude is quite different.  Yes, stupidity, cruelty and fanaticism probably were more widespread in the Middle Ages; in the long run history is mostly moving in a positive direction and a very broad generalization may be made, to which there are plenty of exceptions, that later ages have tended to be wealthier, more knowledgeable, happier, and more virtuous than former ages.  Yet this is no insult to past times but rather a credit to it, for the best men and women of past times worked and hoped for just this result.  To me, it is less interesting that, say, the High Middle Ages knew less and were crueler and less just than today, than how progressive they were: how much more brilliant the 13th century was, for example, than the 9th (at least, in the West).

It is worth thinking, too, of a comparison between a master and disciples: if the master does his work well and the disciples are gifted and diligent, the disciples will learn all the master knows and perhaps surpass him, yet a special respect is due to the master who blazed the trail of knowledge or creativity, vis-a-vis those who imitate him.  In the same way, the great nations of modern Europe, say, England and France, with all their spectacular achievements to which the world is so much indebted, and which we so take for granted now that it seems odd that they should have origins at all, are yet by no means eternal or inevitable but took shape in the course of the Middle Ages, especially the High Middle Ages, and their distinctive character and virtues and institutions may be regarded, in large part, as the handiwork of the genius of that age.  Science, capitalism, the university, ideas and institutions of rights and personal liberty, and representative government all have roots in those times, and while the modern achievements in all these areas surpass those of the medievals, this must be balanced against the reflection that the moderns are to some extent imitators and followers where the medievals were pioneers. 

The historical vanity of the Renaissance, the dim view of the past taken by the religious revolutionaries of the Reformation, and the catastrophes of the 14th century, have conspired to obscure the medieval accomplishments.  Also, some confusion may arise from the fact that it was only when they ventured abroad during the "Expansion of Europe" that began in the late 15th century that the Europeans realized the extent of their superiority.  That superiority certainly did not originate in the late 15th century.  Think of a young man who, after studying for years with an eccentric and humble private tutor, goes to Harvard and discovers that he is regarded there as phenomenally briliant and clever.  If the young man is wise, he might reflect that he must have been underestimating his teacher all along; but he might, instead, conclude that he has suddenly become very intelligent, and congratulate himself on leaving behind his studies with the old teacher, where he got none of these accolades.

The point of all this is to say that it is not with chagrin, but with delight and enthusiasm, that I think I can see many parallels between our own times and the High Middle Ages.

The Ethics of Sovereign Debt

Over at Dani Rodrik's blog, a post that mentions Argentina has touched off a discussion about the ethics of sovereign debt (which Argentina has recently been opting not to pay).  Some of the remarks seem to attack the conceptual foundations of sovereign debt generally.  For example:

if you are a government and you have a million dollar that you can either give to Citibank (who lent it to you predecessor govt) or to feed hungry children, which is the ethical thing to do? I can tell you what the Kirchners' voters here will respond...

Actually, if it's ethical to default on debts in order to give money to the poor, it would seem to undermine the principle even of private credit markets as long as there is any poverty in the world. Although perhaps the point applies to governments in a special way.  But then there's this:

I simply can't think of this as an issue of ethics... WHO in Argentina borrowed in the 90s? WHO in Argentina defaulted? WHO in Argentina should now pay that debt? Are these 'WHOs' the same entity?

Underlying these questions are even deeper questions.  What is a state?  What is a nation or a people?  What is sovereignty?  I was tentatively articulating, without necessary endorsing, the view that maybe the Argentineans have a moral obligation to pay their debts independently of whether it's in their interests to do so.  But it's true that it's far from clear who really incurs any obligations that may be associated with sovereign debt, and who is really bound by them.

I would strongly lean towards the view that governments which are not based on the consent of the people as expressed in elections under conditions of comparative freedom of speech have no moral authority to undertake financial commitments which will be binding on their people.  I would applaud a young democratic regime which refused to pay debts incurred by its autocratic successor on principle, on the grounds that the lenders shouldn't have given money to the pirates who ruled without right, and that indeed they ought if anything to pay indemnities to the country for collaborating with such rulers.  Of course, this would wreak havoc on the business models of the World Bank and the IMF. 

But just because a government is democratic doesn't make the ethical issues go away.  Did the next generation consent to the debts which the US government has already incurred?  Of course, one can keep ethics out of it and assume the lender is not buying a right to be reimbursed with interest, but rather gambling that the political dynamic of the country will result in a stream of payments to a certain class of persons of which he is therefore willing to pay to be a member.  One almost wants to invent a new word for such an arrangement, for the word "debt" has such profound and ineradicable associations with ethical obligation to repay, that a new amoral sense of the word would probably be impossible for the public ever to understand.

Utility and Foreign Aid

My old classmate from Harvard, Chris Blattman, now teaching at Yale, writes of...

... a fourth revolution: the evolution of an economic world order where pockets of deep poverty and instability--namely Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia--persist as Latin America, South and East Asia, and North Africa and the Middle East catch up the wealth of the West. Global peace and security 100 years hence will center on these pockets of deepest poverty, and requires us to treat development in Africa and Central Asia as strategic priorities now.

Two kinds of arguments often made by advocates of foreign aid are (a) "realist"-style arguments that it actual serves the national interest in roundabout ways, because dire poverty abroad threatens our security, and (b) investment arguments that foreign aid is temporary, because if only they are provided with enough capital from abroad, they can escape poverty and won't need it anymore.

I disagree.  I don't think the world's poorest regions constitute much of a threat to the United States.  Middle-income regions are, if anything, more dangerous.  And if foreign aid were going to have big pay-offs in long-run growth, the market would do it.  Some of today's poor countries probably do have bright futures.  And the worldwide economic boom of the past four years has made me hopeful that a global "end of poverty" may indeed occur.  But the claim that foreign aid can spur capital formation and get countries out of a "poverty trap" is speculative at best.

I think the best argument for foreign aid is the simplest: they need the money more than we do.  It's a typical assumption of economics, and I think of common sense, that the 100th dollar is worth more to you than the 1000th.  Economists model this by converting the Benthamite concept of "utility" into mathematical form: U=ln(c), utility=the natural logarithm of capital, is a typical modeling assumption.

Now suppose that the effect of foreign aid is to transfer $100 from an American taxpayer with a $40,000 annual income to an African subsistence farmer who earn $200 a year. The utility loss of the American taxpayer is:

ln($40,000) - ln($39,900) = 10.5966 - 10.5941 = .0025

The utility gain for the African farmer is:

ln($300) - ln($200) = 5.7037 - 5.2983 = .4055

Thus the utility gain to the African is 162 times greater than the utility loss to the American.  But of course, this assumes a costless transfer.  It is plausibly argued that the aid process is highly wasteful at many stages, from the distortionary taxes that raise the money to the perverse incentives created for poor-country governments to the salaries paid to maintain foreign-aid bureaucracies.  Let's suppose that 90% of aid money is wasted along the way and the African only gets $10.  Is aid still worth it?

The utility gain to the African is reduced to ln($210) - ln($200) = .0488.  This still 19.52 times larger than the utility loss to the American.

Of course, one may have principled objections to taking the property of the rich to help the poor, regardless of the utilitarian consequences.  To some extent, I do.  And it is different, of course, if you really believe that foreign aid, on balance, harms poor countries, a claim for which I am aware of no remotely adequate evidence, but which might possibly be true.  But libertarian critiques of foreign aid are often simplistic-- government is bad, foreign aid is government, so abolish foreign aid-- and what they really reflect is the lack of a political constituency for foreign aid, since its beneficiaries are foreign.  After all, some foreign aid supports activities that even libertarians scarcely deny are appropriate functions of government-- judicial reform, say, or development of property rights systems-- or that they are in practice reconciled to-- government provision of roads, public financing of primary and secondary education, disaster relief, etc.