Capitalism run by moral and ethical people of conscience

Herb wrote: "Perhaps a Capitalism run by moral and ethical people of conscience."

I'd run like a dog if everyone was moral and ethical people of conscience. I'd rather believe everyone is a crook, just thinking of themselves.

I think we've run into trouble believing that we can trust all those offering services to us—that they are moral and ethical people of conscience. Maybe it is safer to assume the opposite, that they have only self-interest. I'm shopping for insurance. Everyone wants to sell me their policy. I realize that and don't assume that everyone has my best interest in their heart. So I weigh one policy against the other, and hope for the best.

Imagine you go to buy birth-control whatever at the pharmacy. This ethical person of conscience says that since I am a 15 years old, they better notify my parents, because their morals tell them that 15 year-olds shouldn't be out there having sex. A clever 15 year-old might question each pharmacist, asking "are you moral and ethical?" and if they say yes, then they would question their morals and make sure that there was an "alignment of morals."

The beauty of self-interest is that it is a lot more dependable that morality. My father claimed that there is no morality... only the law (he was a lawyer). I was quite upset with his statement until I started to wonder, "what morality? whose morality?"

Capitalism won't do the job... a reply to Rachel.

Abdel works at Consuelo's Kitchen and
also has a business on the side selling hat racks.
He serves a smile and great food.

Rachel wrote, 

"I cannot imagine the capitalism I see in the world producing the things we really need, like dignified creative work for all, an unpolluted environment, time and safe spaces to be physically active, time to care for our bodies, our psyches, and our loved ones. "

You're idealistic, as everyone should be. You see good and bad coming from capitalism, and want only good. Nothing wrong with that.

The question is, "what do we do instead?" We see that "it ain't perfect," so we want to throw out the child with the bathwater.

Then what?

Do we find a benevolent dictator? What?

Your dad says it is more complicated than I think it is. Most things probably are. Though I remember that Mr. Einstein said that when we really understand things we will find very simple relationships.

I make bread, you make flour. I trade you bread for flour. You have the only wheat field, I have the only oven. Sometimes you feel I take advantage of you. Sometimes I feel you take advantage of me. But we need each other.

No, it isn't the perfect system. But I don't know what we should do instead.

The Brandeis Ratio of Rich and Poor

The Brandeis ratio, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/opinion/dont-tax-the-rich-tax-inequality-itself.html?src=recg, describes the disparity between rich and poor. The article, and believers in the the detriment of the inequality, claim that we need to take money from the rich and give it to the poor. I agree about the detriment, but not that this is the solution.

When I was growing up, Robin Hood was not a hero. No one claimed it was right for us to garnish wages because one was earning too much. We saw that Karl Marx's slogan, "each according to his ability, to each according to his need," popularized in 1875, was not to be our way.

There is another solution to inequality. But first, is it really the inequality that is the problem, or is it the poverty? Would it matter if we had ten times the number of billionaires if everyone else had what they needed?

I'm not so worried about economic power being in the hands of a few as long as we have a democracy. The other constitutes a large minority and (I believe) will eventually prevail.

Imagine if the conversation shifted to how can we reduce poverty? Do we really believe that taxing more would do anything for the poor? What it will do it to make the government (still) bigger. Why and how would these dollars trickle down to the poor? And would this enable the poor to produce more goods and services, make them more employable, and, in the end, reduce the disparity?

I believe that taxing the rich to reduce the disparity is a pipe dream. It is easy to say, "redistribute wealth to fix disparity." It is harder to say, "equip the poor with the means to earn more."

Naked or Nude or ?

Last night at the Off Center Theater in Austin, George Krause showed his sfumato (to smoke, no outlines) life-sized photos of people without clothes.

Soon after I arrived at the exhibition, a woman started to undress. I thought that someone was inspired by the photographs and decided that they would make a statement as well. Before I knew it, 10 or 15 people were all naked, wandering around the pictures that hung diagonally from a grid on the theater's stage. So we had three groups of people. The ethereal ones, radiating light in the photos. Their counterparts (and some of the models in the photos), moving around the gallery as if clothes (and shame) had never been invented, and then there was me, and you, and the others, still clinging to, and hiding behind, our clothes.

Somewhat reminiscent of Richard Avedon's pictures of the American West, he photographed these people as they were, so it seems. They are not naked, as Adam and Eve are often portrayed in the Garden of Eden. There is no shame, yet the figures are not sexual. They are just there, as if they never wore clothes. Yet not innocent as Brooke Shields appeared in The Blue Lagoon.

And perhaps the man above was being a little shy. They are not nudes, as in an Edward Weston or an Alfred Steiglitz. They are not romantic. And they are very beautiful. But not beautiful like a flower, or a lion. They show more the effects of living in the 21st century. Their bodies did not seem to have been physically challenged to survive. Some have been worn from the effects of aging. Others have been shaped by their love of food.

George said that he was trying to redefine the nude. These are non-sexual figures. They are not idealized figures, but were photographed with the care that one might use in photographing the last of a species of a beetle soon to go extinct. The light from behind obscures the edges, so they appear like sources of energy rather that objects reflecting light. They are one with their surrounding spaces. As imperfect as these specimens are, they are part of the world, melting into the space that we all share. They are us. We are them.

Anger serves a constructive purpose... not.

Click on picture to enlarge.

I'm glad that Hans suggested I write about anger serving a constructive purpose... because that makes me a little angry. It is actually pragmatism that ticks me off. William James, in trying to find a philosophy that would blend the empiricist and the religious, wrote that

The tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.

There is nothing that doesn't have a constructive purpose. If it wasn't for Hitler, my father-in-law would not have gone to Germany to fight, and instead would have had kids earlier. My wife would not have been born, and hence, my kids would not have been born, and I'd still be running around with a red wagon and two socks that don't match.

Does that mean we celebrate Hitler?

There are a number of emotions that don't make the world any sweeter: hate, jealousy, envy, and last, but not least, anger. Some constructive action comes from each of these, but we also can arrive at those actions simply by doing jobs that need to be done.

We don't need to get angry at a baby because she soiled her diapers. We can simply see changing her diapers as a job to be done. We don't need to get angry at the Exxon for polluting the air. We can simply (or maybe not so simply) find a way to improve the emissions or clean the air.

And we don't need to rationalize the poisons because of some off-beat benefit(s). We should look instead at 1) the poisons' ill effects, physically and mentally, on ourselves and others and 2) what problems need to be solved because suffering is occurring. That's it.

More on Dogma, Analysis, and Intuitive Wisdom... and Anger

So when we are in the analysis mode, and hear intuitive wisdom, rather than "waking up"... as in the koans, we take it as dogma. I think that is why the book we used for the global warming course was so upsetting to me.

My dad went from atheist, to agnostic, to... on his deathbed... speaking about meeting his wife in heaven. Dogma, analysis, intuitive wisdom. So the same thought, "atheism or meeting his wife," can be dogma or intuitive wisdom. Maybe that is what makes communication about the climate so difficult. One person's dogma is another person's intuitive wisdom.

I've heard some speak of anger as a result of fear. It seems that fear is what we feel when we don't know what to do. We are in the "victim" mode, succumbing to the defensive role. The samurai warrior does not feel any anger (nor fear). Feeling (and expressing) anger, to me, is a fault... where to others it is an expression of how we really feel... or what makes us real.

Al Gore's Dogma and Anger, and the limit to my intuitive wisdom.

Chevy Chase, from the Climate Reality Project sent me this missive today:

Dear Kim,

I don't know about you, but I get angry when I hear people claim that global warming isn't real. We know that the science is clear and climate change is an urgent problem. And we need more people to learn the truth....

The letter went on to talk about how Al Gore trained 3000 people to talk about climate change and Chevy wanted my money to pay for more presentations.

Driving to the Zen Center I wondered if Chevy Chase's anger was more a threat to our lives that climate change.

The other day I read the words in an email, "destroy the planet," and I questioned whether there was some less violent way of describing our precious lives on earth. Then G asked me if I was going to sign up for the Environmental Workshop and I told her that I would get angry. She said that it would be an opportunity to practice "equanimity." (Don't you love Buddhists?) She added, think of all the stuff you've gotten from global warming to write about.

Then I read on one of my previous blog posts a comment from a former colleague, M, in St. Louis,

"What is the debate really? This is proven and accepted science. Are we to debate the veracity of human evolution, the spherical nature of the earth, the age of the planet?"

I barely could get out of my chair this afternoon to go to the Zen Center, afraid that the dogma was making me into an obedient zombie. Anyway... I did go and was glad to be back after a couple weeks of playing hooky.

I was shoved out of my chair by this brilliant little paragraph that was sent to me from the Juniperpath.org website (no relation to Austin's Juniper).

The Three Moments is a model for describing the process of inner realization on the Buddhist path. T.R.V. Murti first coined the term in his classic work, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism¹. Murti saw the main task of Buddhist training as “purifying the mind and freeing it of the cobwebs and clogs of dogmatism.”² This occurs by examining and, ultimately, deconstructing the artificial edifice on which one’s inner life is built. The result is a refined level of awareness that is the basis for reorienting how we experience and engage the world.

The three moments comprise three states of inner maturation along the spiritual path: dogma, critical analysis, and intuitive wisdom. They can be summarized as follows:

• Dogma: the unquestioned acceptance of what we know.
• Critical analysis: examining what we know.
• Intuitive Wisdom: going beyond what we know.

_________________________________________
1 T.R.V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, (New Delhi, India: Munshiram Manoharlal 1955), 140-143
2 The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 146

So what a beautiful gift to get that email. Just as William Blake spoke of innocence, experience, and organized innocence, so does the Buddhist path of dogma, analysis, and intuitive wisdom show us the stages of understanding. Perhaps it is just dogma for those who claim that knowing the planet is burning is not rocket science, and that you see one melting iceberg and you know that the world is coming to an end... and that it is our fault.

If you've gotten this far, you need a little humor. Please see the Onion's take on the environment where they report that "If global warming isn't under control by 2006, scientists say it will achieve unstoppable momentum, destroying the only planet we have."

So if by now you are scratching your head and wondering what I believe anyway... join the club. I do believe that anger should have no part of this conversation. That might be the limit of my "intuitive wisdom."