The Christian Hanky Code

The Christian Hanky Code

Globalization of Labor

One of the nice things about living on a planet with 6 billion neighbors is, if you're interested in a topic, someone somewhere has already researched it, compiled their findings, and published an article on it! In this case the author happens to be a Harvard professor of Economics, so I'm not too sure how bright the guy is. But he puts some of the most complex issues of the day in clear, succinct language. And since I agree with everything he has to say, I can only recommend you go read the paper for yourself.

Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...

My impression of the Immigration Bill is that, from theperspective of stopping illegal immigration, legislation is irrelevant.  The most we can hope for from the law is thatit might give direction to the flow. This impression stems from an ecological perspective, in which illegalimmigration is a process taking place within the larger context of economic anddemographic globalization.

The United States, as a developed nation, has undergonedemographic transition.  This meansmiddle class WASP-ish Americans are disappearing, no matter what, due to anegative population growth curve.  At thesame time, we have an economic model of continuous growth, which requires apositive population growth curve.  Ifthere weren’t constantly new jobs being created, the national economy wouldcollapse, and with it the global market.

The commodification of labor guarantees that those new jobs willbe filled, as cheaply as possible, one way or another.  In a global free market, labor supply willmeet demand at the market’s price.  Whetherthat happens through immigration or outsourcing makes no difference.  American business has a choice: import cheapforeign labor to maintain domestic production, or export production facilitiesto developing countries like Indiaand Brazil.  In the current economic and legalenvironment, those are the only real options for globally competitiveindustries.  And in the age of globalsupply chains and electronic commerce, every mom-and-pop store, every farmer,every factory and office worker faces global competition in an unregulatedmarket.

Unregulated Capitalist markets have long been understood asa formula for oligarchy.  So why is theinternational labor market unregulated? And isn’t that part of the purpose of immigration law in the firstplace?  Given the above context, we cansee why immigration law and other forms of regulation are doomed to failure byhalf measures.  The driving forces in theimmigration crisis are the global commodification of labor and the disparity inpopulation growth between the post-industrial and developing worlds.

National laws are marginalized to the point of irrelevanceby Globalization.  This has long been thecomplaint of Environmentalists, who must confront the reality that, even onthose rare occasions when they score a major legislative victory,multinationals can simply relocate their environmentally destructive behaviorto less regulated foreign markets. Further, having done so, these same companies can then lobby bothgovernment and popular opinion with the (very true) argument that these lawsare just obstructing domestic economic growth without doing anything to benefitthe environment.  In essence, policieslike our rejection of the Kyoto Protocols amount to capitulation to thismessage from business to government: “We’ll just cheat, so don’t bother makinglaws.”  Corporate multi-nationalism hasmarginalized national sovereignty and crippled the power of law to regulate themarket.  So long as no transnationalgovernment exists to exercise regulatory power over multinational corporations,they will continue to operate in a mercantilist Wild West where all are drivenby competitive pressure to exploit every opportunity, no matter how unethical,to maximize profits.

The combination of economic growth and population declinecreates a demographic vacuum.  In thetopography of global population movements, North America and Western Europe aredownhill from Central America and North Africa.  So long as we ignore this reality, so long aswe remain in denial about its inevitable consequences, our reactions will onlyhasten our own destruction.  Our currentcourse leads inexorably towards ethnic apartheid: the Two-State Solution.  This represents an inherently unstable statefor the socio-political ecosystem; it is a recipe for revolution.   Our only recourse is to become again whatmade us a great nation in the first place. We must become a multicultural melting pot.

Truthiness

I decided a few weeks ago to write a piece on immigration, as a way of educating myself. I hadn't much been paying attention to the issue until a few days earlier, and when a friend asked me my position on the Immigration Bill, I realized I didn't have one. It seemed like I should, but all I had was an opinion (which is that this is going to be Desegregation all over again).

I didn't have a position, just an opinion. Now here's a distinction almost nobody could have grasped a year ago. Thank God for Steven Colbert!

I read Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1994. The book really struck a nerve with its argument that the replacement of newspapers by television news had dumbed down political debate in this country. I'd been traumatized by the spread of the Dittoheads for a few years, ever since the rabbi of the Orthodox synagogue I used to attend started quoting Rush Limbaugh from the pulpit.

About the same time, I had my first exposure to Libertarianism, on the politics forum of a local BBS (back in the day). Suddenly one day all my nerdy friends became Libertarians, seemingly overnight. I came to discover that these otherwise intelligent people had become the quasi-Dittoheads of Neil Boortz. They had switched off their critical thinking on social and political issues, in favor of a handful of patriotic aphorisms and vague references to complex economic principles, delivered by an engaging and confrontational talk-show personality. None of them could tell me what the party's current policy platform was; just that they were going to transform America into free-market utopia of locally governed communities where private individuals live in tax-free bliss.

At the time, I was just shocked and disappointed at the stupidity of my smart friends. I understood that heated exchanges and diatribes would always be more popular than the boring political talk shows of the day. But I assumed intelligent people would continue to understand and uphold the values of informed citizenship. I was burdened with the sadly elitist notion that marketing didn't work on the critical thinking of intellectuals I didn't think smart people fell for demagogues.

It never occurred to me then, that I was seeing a defining moment in the greatest battle of Pat Buchanan's Culture War, the battle for control of the Fourth Estate. But over the course of following decade, I saw the entire tradition of civic virtue and activist citizenship crumble as American Journalism became first the victim, then the mouthpiece, of an antidemocratic Corporatist power elite. Recently, having seen Frontline's penetrating analysis of Carl Rove's career and strategic vision, I've come to accept that the whole thing was carefully orchestrated by the enemies of the Illuminati.

Nobody ever talks about policy issues anymore. Most people don't even know what the important issues of the day are. They speak instead of vague concepts, like "the economy," "security," and "privacy." Politics revolves around "anger-issues" that bring voters to the polls and get high ratings on talk shows.

This transformation of informed citizens into consumers of truthiness was the crowning achievement in the subversion of Democracy. Nobody sounded the alarm, because the first thing the mob did was buy off the cops. So now a bloodless coup has replaced American national sovereignty with a transnational oligarchic theocracy, and political liberty with product selection.

It makes me want to shop.

Prophetic Consciousness

I am a spy in the house of the Lord.

According to the Kabbalah, the actions of ordinary men are in their own hands, but the works of kings are in the hands of God. Before wars are fought on earth, their outcome is determined in battle between angelic hosts. What does this mean? It means that zeitgeist and volksgeist are real concepts, represented in Jewish esoteric literature as the angelic princes of the seventy nations. It means that, while free will may affect something on the level of interpersonal relationships, it counts for nothing on the level of international relations.

I like to imagine some seraphic bureaucrat toiling away at the job of implementing heavenly policy – melting a glacier here, mutating a strain of N5H1 there, whispering sweet nothings in the President’s ear as he sleeps. I look at the situation of the world, and I imagine it as a purposeful result. This is hardly uncommon. It’s a practice shared by paranoiacs worldwide, from strict Calvinists to conspiracy theorists.

I suspect if most Liberals were of a similar theological bent, they would quickly become Gnostics. But I go in a slightly different direction. I’m not interested in figuring out who’s really part of the international banking conspiracy, or whether God is really a sadistic uberdaddy demiurge. I’m interested in reverse-engineering the process. I want to know the functional requirements of the system. What is all of this chaos and suffering for?

Angels are just an angle. Here’s another model, also from Kabbalah: God created the world in four stages, similar to the steps one might take to build a house. The first stage of creation is the primordial inspiration of the will. The second stage is the conception of that will in the mind: “I’ll build a house.” The third stage is the elaboration of the general concept of “a house” into the specific concept of “this house:” the number and type of rooms, their general layout, and what kind of materials (e.g. wood or brick). The fourth stage is the specification of the building plan: a blueprint. The fifth stage is the implementation of the plan, which involves workers and tools and results in a move-in date.

“As above, so below.” If you’ve ever wondered why Freemasons call God the Great Geometer and pattern their own spiritual development after training in the craft of building, wonder no more. This five-stage model of creation is a classic description of an engineering project. Cathedrals and roads and rockets to the moon are all built this way. The Mason’s self-development, the cultivation of virtue allegorized in the building of Solomon’s Temple, is a microcosmic work of imitatio Dei.

Software project management also uses a modified version of this “waterfall model” of development. The difference between building static and well-understood structures like a bridge or a tower, and building novel and dynamic structures like a software application or a living organism, is that the later requires the ability to integrate feedback from implementation into the earlier planning stages. The current popular solution to this problem is called the “iterative and incremental” approach to project management. It first arose in AI development, where the goal is modeling learning and evolutionary development. So then the question becomes: “Is programming more like building a clock or making a baby?”

If Software Engineers had only received a little training in Kabbalah, they might have saved themselves the well-documented embarrassment of an average 80% failure-rate. These days, the principle of “iterative and incremental development” is part of methodologies like RUP and XP, but it took a lot of trial and error to realize the need for this approach. Also, it hasn’t helped much, because most people suck at using it.

The Kabbalah, however, articulates this concept as a primary factor in the nature of the universe. The five steps outlined above are a behavioral model of a system, to which the corresponding and much better-known structural model is the Tree of Life, made up of ten Sephirot (divine modes of behavior). The Central Dogma of Kabbalah is that, “Everything is made up of ten Sephirot, including each of the ten Sephirot.” In other words, cosmic creation has a fractal structure, reflecting an endlessly iterative and incremental process of development.

Having thus established a link between the Mysteries of Creation revealed in the mystical and arcane Kabbalah, on the one hand, and the occult sciences of Process Modeling and Software Development on the other, it immediately occurred to me to wonder, what would the problem domain look like if the world today approximates a programmed solution? At first glance, a productive insight: Natural Theology 2.0. Alas, my metaphoric angelic bureaucrat has written spaghetti code, with a stereotypical lack of documentation and inadequate quality control. God is a Cowboy Coder.

I have little else of certainty to report. Speculation to follow....

Principles and Influences of Eco-Theology

Natural Theology:

The physical world is a creation or emanation of the divine. Just as a work of art reveals something of the artist's nature, so too physical reality reflects and embodies spiritual truths.

The world is a revelation of divine will. Nature can be read as scripture.

Ecological Paradigm:

The fundamental biological system is the organism. Organisms are made up of organs, which are made up of tissues, which are made up of cells, etc. Going the other direction, individual organisms of the same species living together in the same place make up a population. Groups of populations make up a community. The components that define an ecosystem include a non-living environment and the living community that inhabits it.

A system is defined in terms of a static collection of components and the dynamic interactions between them. Complex systems are made up of subsystems, which may themselves be made up of more basic subsystems.

The relationships that define an ecosystem form a web of competition and cooperation between its member populations and individual organisms. This holistic web of life replaces the hierarchical concept of food-chains.

Complexity and Emergence:

There is no simple, reductionist correspondence between different levels of organization. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Life is not found in the inanimate chemicals that make up living organisms; but neither is it an outside force that mysteriously enters into matter. Instead, life emerges from the complex interactions of its non-living components.

Likewise, societies are not reducible to their individual members. Individuals participate in societies with unique cultural and historical influences beyond the personal motivations of their members.

Process Philosophy:

The world is not made up of independent things in themselves. Instead, the world consists only of relationships, which are ongoing interactions.

An entity is the union of a set of interactions. In other words, individuals have no separate identity, apart from our environment. Instead, we are the sum of our relationships with others.

If we say the individual organism is made up of nothing but chemical processes, this is true. If we say the individual is nothing but chemicals, this is false. The living organism emerges from the activity of its inanimate molecules. Likewise, identity emerges from the complex web of interactions between entities.

Liberation Theology:

Because everything is connected, there is no individual salvation, enlightenment or happiness. Consequently, legitimate spiritual struggle always involves social, economic and political elements.

"No Justice, No Peace."

Eco-Theology:

Humanity exists in community with other orders of being. Just as human populations share the biosphere (global ecosystem) with other orders of life (plants, animals, bacteria and fungi), we also participate in a spiritual ecosystem. Instead of a "Great Chain of Being" with God at the top and inanimate matter at the bottom, this spiritual ecology is a holistic web of relationships that includes physical and non-physical orders of being.

We are in community with the gods and other spiritual beings, humanity and other forms of organic life, the land and the cosmos.