Sentimental perhaps,
but I enjoyed being with old friends, signing Christmas Carrols last
night. It would mean something very
different back home, I suppose. But here
in Beijing, so far from the overwhelming normalcy the season and the deluge of
mandatory Christmas music in every public environment you encounter, the songs felt
a bit undiluted and even melancholy and contemplative as perhaps they once
were, in some other era. One guest from
Switzerland told everyone the words to Silent Night in the German it was
originally written in and “Stille Nacht”
sounded lovely. Composed in 1818 by
Franz Gruber in the small town of Oberndorf bei Salzburg, Austria. I can imagine the snowy peaks that surround
that city and consider the lyrics penned by a young priest, Joseph Mohr.
Sipping mulled wine, of course, I met a young man from
Argentina who had lived in Japan and now was in Beijing. I asked if whether or not he spoke any Japanese. He did and so I introduced him to my stepson
who was there and does as well.
Speaking with him it was interesting to note his observations about the
two countries. When he lived in Japan,
he regarded China with disdain, thinking it was unclean, when he used to
visit. However now, having lived here,
he suggested that he preferred his life in China to the one he’d had in Japan. He suggested that he felt more accepted, and more
welcome in Chinese culture. Japan, the
remarkable sui generis Galapagos
island nation, beautiful somehow because it keeps its distance. China rather, the continental giant that has
forever grown, not by conquest but by attractive powers of absorption. One more partygoer slowly being
assimilated.
There was a sad face in the Times this morning. An inmate, who looked like one of my old
students from Brownsville Brooklyn, Mr. Jesse Webster.
Put away at a time when one of my old students would have been the age that
this man was in the early 90's, when he was sentenced for life, for dealing cocaine. He received life in prison with no chance
for parole under the ‘three-strikes-you’re-out’ sentencing of that time. The article traces the story of his appeal
for clemency to President Obama and how none was granted at this juncture for
this individual.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/a-dealer-serving-life-without-having-taken-one.html?hpw&rref=us
I hope the commutations continue President Obama. What purpose is served by holding non-violent
offenders without hope? The quote that
caught me was by a representative of the ACLU speaking about sentencing at that
time, when crime seemed to be rising ever upward, the world becoming more and
more dangerous.
“We kind of lost our moral center and any sense
of proportionality in our sentencing” during the so-called war on drugs, Ms.
Gupta said. “The result was the throwing away of certain people’s lives,
predominantly black and brown people’s lives.”
The
frenzied call to “do something” from that time, unhinging people from their
sense of proportion. Punish someone with
life in prison for selling drugs regardless of whether or not they ever
physically hurt anyone. And with time,
we must reflect.
This
notion of a moral center is the crux of a different article by a different
priest that caught my attention this morning as well. HackerNews had another compelling piece from
The Guardian concerning the morality of the market.
It is an interesting article, penned by
Malcolm Brown, an assistant to the Arch Bishop of Canterbury trying to look
fresh at a critique of market forces. It
begins with Mr. Brown’s own “conversion” to a perception of free markets as a
force for good, distributing goods, creating value, etc. Monopolies conversely are where unregulated
markets veer towards, hardening, destroying opportunities for value
creation. Keynesians look to the
government to regulate monopolies, for the health of the economy. What Mr. Brown suggests is that a sense of
morality should also naturally and forcefully act to retard
monopolization.
The mistake a lot of
Christians (and others) made about economics was
locating the
competition mechanism firmly in the sphere of sin. But, as my old mentor
Professor Ronald Preston, who studied economics under R H Tawney and theology
with Reinhold Niebuhr, used to point out, in economics the opposite of
competition is not co-operation but monopoly. Christians on the left had missed
an important moral argument for markets – that free competition, where no one
firm or small group can dictate the products and the prices, is a safeguard
against excessive accumulations of power and wealth.
There is an acceptance of human’s
innate need to compete, as healthy. And
some sense of morality, rather than pure economic theory or algorithmic
refinement as the necessary component therefore, in optimizing the capability
of markets. When small innovative
businesses disrupt yesterdays giants, yesterdays entitlements, it isn’t simply
“good” for the economy and jobs. We all
note something moral at play as well. That’s part of why, I think, we look at most
disruptive startups as “cool.”
Interestingly, this is what the same
conundrum that China is facing with its recent plenum. The rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) is all about breaking up the large state owned enterprises (SOEs) they
allowed to flourish, because they are an impediment to growth in the domestic
economy. Unregulated under the relative
timidity of the last administration, the SOEs ballooned into some of the
largest companies in the world. Fed from
the state till they have crowded out all the day light in the canopy, choking out the “real” innovation down on the rain forest floor that China so desperately
wants to see flourish.
The CCP, who have all but completely
jettisoned the ethical framework that underpins the second “C” in their moniker,
must also look now to buttress their economic vision for a better functioning
economy with some sort of moral framework.
China in this oddly amoral epoch looks back, of course, to thousands of
years and a variety of wisdom traditions to cull from. Nationalism alone, like prosperity will fall
short of this broad need for a moral framework to explain the life in front of
us and chart some kind of growth that is sustainable.
It seems that both civilizations, China
and the West, in their own way, have arrived at this searching, modern moment
where we agree what it is that makes markets function better, and that creative
destruction will lead to more innovation and prosperity. But why and in what manner should we
proceed? As Mr. Brown suggests, prosperity
is not simply a function of the amoral driver of greed. Reframed, reconsidered, the
drive for prosperity maximizes opportunities for people, which is a force for
good. What then are the ethics that
guide this innovation and creative destruction?
It strikes me that there is a setting
being laid for a contemporary, international
articulation of morality. A 集思广益[1] that is informed by theology,
(Christian, Buddhist, Confucian) and by ideology, (Communism, free markets,)
but not beholden to any one in dogmatic
consistency. People will invariably try
to reclaim one or the other tradition as a new contemporary interpretation of
one or the other tradition for this post-post-modern epoch. Soon, scientific breakthroughs will force new, heretofore-unexplored ethical challenges. Hopefully the free market of ideas will
result in continued creative destruction of any one of these religious or ideological resurrections, so
that, rather we have a more interesting synthesis of moral guidance that speaks
to the broad wealth of human contributions therein.
[1] jísīguǎngyì: collecting opinions is of wide benefit
(idiom); to pool wisdom for mutual benefit / to profit from widespread
suggestions
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