Modernity is part of the water in which we as swim and breathe as fishes in Western culture. P. E. Gobry has written a blog post in which he attempts to “reconcile” Modernity and Christianity, and thereby realize what value there is to be found in Modernity, as well as find avenues of Christian criticisms of Modernity that actually make sense.
It’s an interesting piece that raises a lot of questions. Gobry’s goal, one which I very much endorse, is “productive understanding”. I don’t find all of his paradigms to be as “productive” as I could wish; to be honest, the very term “original sin” makes me wince these days, being a provocative, polarizing term for something that could be described more constructively. But the goal is a rare and refreshing one in a Christian writer.
My biggest criticism is that he stopped writing a bit too soon (a rare criticism for me to make) — I would love to see him offer a similar treatment of Postmodernity.
(Keep in mind, Modernism : Modernity :: Postmodernism : Postmodernity. Roughly speaking, the first item in each pair is the philosophy, the second is the corresponding era and/or resulting social conditions.)
I recently ran across this quote from the play of Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms:
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
“Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
“This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
Examples of this are everywhere. I spent money for a house, which happens to have room for an extra freezer, for which I also spent extra, which allows me to save money by stocking up on certain foods and freezing them for later. If I’d had an extra two thousand bucks handy at the time I was building my house, I could have installed radiant in-floor heating in my basement and saved a good deal on my heating bill every winter.
In many cases, in order to save money by spending less you actually have to start with more money.
When reading Bruces Hauman’s article to which you linked, all I could think of was, “It’s a good thing it’s sheltered from the wind by the trees because if it was in a field, it would blow away.”
Bruce Hauman built a small dome living space for about $2,100 USD. All by itself, the fact that he built it and wrote it up so well is delightful.
In the photos, it looks very nice as a workspace or outbuilding, but interestingly, he says that he lives there.
“If I want to spend my time writing blog posts, exploring new programming languages, and other things that I want to do but I am unlikely to get paid for, it’s helpful to opt out of certain common expenses. Housing is a major expense that is ripe for pruning.
“Conventional housing requires that we spend a tremendous amount of energy and money to construct and maintain a home. The comfort and living convenience that we get from these large and inefficient houses does not increase linearly with their higher cost. There is a decreasing marginal efficiency as investment in a home goes up.”
Amen, brother! So…where’s the bathroom?
Look, I totally get, and dig, the philosophy. But let’s look at the other side of the question. It’s safety and energy efficiency that are driving up the base cost of building a house, not comfort and convenience. If you want to live within city limits (read: where the jobs are), certain officials are going to see to it that you live in something that won’t blow away in a storm or kill you in a fire. And that means it’s going to cost a bit more than living in a trailer home.
All I’m saying is that there are huge trade-offs to be considered when going down the cheap housing road, trade-offs that mean the cost of housing is not, in fact “ripe for pruning”.
Camden. “Your coworkers all say you were a very kind person.”
Destry. “I guess so — I tried to be. It’s sure nice of them to say so.”
Camden. “How did you balance that kindness, in your own mind I mean, how did you see that as fitting in with the requirements of your job?”
Destry. “I don’t understand. Are you saying my job required me to be mean to my coworkers?”
Camden. “No, no, I was actually thinking more of the public — how you carried yourself, if you will, in relation to the people coming through.”
Destry. “Wait, wait. Okay. So my coworkers were saying I was kind to the travelers? Like, too nice? Is that the idea?”
Camden. “Well, didn’t you ever wonder if you had become perhaps a bit too accomodating? Like maybe you tipped the balance too far in one direction?”
Destry. “Sorry, no. Absolutely not.”
Camden. “Why not?”
Destry. “Look, I see where this is going, and it’s not only cheap, it’s nonsense. I’m not offended or anything, but that’s just the honest truth.”
Camden. “Okay, but if you don’t mind, though, let’s go there — just hear it out. The bomber crosses the border: turns out, luck of the draw, he has to go through you. The opportunity you had — you could have likely prevented 12/01 and all that followed from that, the opportunity was there. Hasn’t it ever kept you up at night, questioning why it was, for whatever reason, you didn’t end up seeing that opportunity or taking it, even by accident, on some kind of hunch? Perhaps that habitual skepticism would have served you better than habitual niceness?”
Destry. “I see it very differently. It isn’t my responsibility — whether in life or even just the way our legal code is oriented, it isn’t my responsibility to visit shame and suspicion on anyone without good cause. In fact I’m personally proud that I never did so.”
Camden. “Were there no red flags that would have aroused suspicion, legitimate suspicion, had you been more keen to find them?”
Destry. “People like to try and say he ought to have been detained, whether because of his travel record, or whetever. These people have no experience. The fact is it would have been a huge violation of protocol, not to mention his rights as a citizen.”
Camden. “You’re talking about civil rights for a mass murderer.”
Destry. “Well, I’m talking about civil rights for a person who at that time had never committed a crime in his life.”
Camden. “He was clearly planning to, though.”
Destry. “Look, what he did was horrible, but this is a free country. It’s not a crime for people to entertain horrible ideas here. A free country doesn’t detain people because they might commit a crime in the future.”
Camden. “But how can you play the protocol card in a case like this? ‘I was just following orders’ and all that. Don’t we rely on the independent judgment of our front-line officers?”
Destry. “The fact is I was doing both. You can do both. I mean, I used my own judgment, and I decided — correctly, by any reasonable standard — that he had every right to enter. I wasn’t consulting anyone. I wasn’t taking orders. I own that decision, and I know it was the right one. The kind of independent judgment you’re talking about is — well it’s just vigilantism, basically. That would be telling the security branch to treat our own citizens, every man, woman and child, as a possible threat and to harrass them in ways that give them no recourse. We saw how well that worked out for the States in the 20’s. It eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Camden. “Hang on, bring it back a bit. I’m not talking about bringing back the surveillance state. I’m just asking about your own individual approach.”
Destry. “You’re suggesting I should think like a surveillance state.”
Camden. “But don’t you see the simple objection? The other side of the issue — that if you had been more inclined to look with a critical eye, just by habit — would you have picked up on something, even just something gut-level that you couldn’t put your finger on, that would have led you to take a different course?”
Destry. “There wasn’t anything to pick up on, nothing behavioral, nothing in the travel documents. And as far as my gut goes, my gut told me that I personally knew very little about this man, that like everyone he probably had his own personal battles and stresses that I couldn’t know anything about, and that I ought to treat him fairly and kindly. And yes I do sleep easy at night knowing I followed my gut on that. In fact I’ll probably sleep even easier knowing my coworkers noticed I did that consistently.”
Camden. “A lot of people feel at least some of the blame lies on you — do you understand them when they say that? You don’t fault them for that, do you?”
Destry. “Look, I don’t fault anyone for the things they say or feel in the midst of immense grief, or from having — from knowing almost nothing about the situation without realizing it. But anyone who tries to approach it rationally, they really ought to realize what the choices are with regards to national security. Would you rather live under a threat from the outside, or from criminals, say, or under the constant skepticism of your own government? Would you rather the security branch read all your mail and treated you like a felon every time you travel, or would you rather we lived and governed by principles of decency and kindness? I mean, you’re right that I’m not the whole government, but that’s how I ran my booth.”
Camden. “In a sense, though, one might say that thousands of people are dead because of your principles of decency and kindness. So how kind were those ideals, really? In the end, how decent was it?”
Destry. “Yeah, look. If I had compromised my responsibilities in any way — you sound like you think I was just a happy face with a badge passing out vitamin water and waving people through. I never did that. If I had, in any way, this would be a totally different conversation, but I never did. The reality is that a decent, moral people who chooses to be governed by principles of decency and morality will always be a prey to cowards and monsters. That’s not something to be ashamed of.”
I still believe that this is an unworkable premise for Major League sports. MLB requires a roster of 25 players on a team, but according to this site, which looks accurate, there are only 17 active players in the league who were born in Minnesota.
I suppose there are probably a handful of players who were lucky to have parents who moved here and they ended up graduating high school at that time, but that data is not enumerated online as far as I can tell.
It just seems to me that the conclusion of this plan is that only the most populated states would be able to host a MLB team and that the Minnesota Twins franchise would be forced to relocate elsewhere.
I floated this idea on Facebook last winter, and the idea was met with a variety of criticisms.
“Plenty of people have jobs in states they were neither raised in or graduated from, in all professions.” True, but those jobs aren’t billed as representing a particular area in a competition. The MLB/NFL/NHL/NBA situation right now is like if the USA hired all Canadians and Russians to fill the roster on our hockey team in the Olympics.
“If each team could only pull from their state, than states like California with over 35 million people would have a much better chance at getting good players than states like Minnesota who have only 5 million people.” Yes, that’s how it works in the Olympics as well: the biggest countries win most of the medals. Is that system not fair enough for you?
“Awarding of number one draft picks would be impossible if they had to come from their individual states.” Yes, the current draft system would be scrapped.
“What about people who come from a state without a major-league franchise?” Again, I take my cue from the Olympic model. You can’t just play for any country you want, so if your country doesn’t field a team in a particular sport, you’re out of luck. But on the other hand, there are practically no barriers to entry: any country that can get a team together, and qualify, can play. So ideally we would find ways to lower the barriers to entry for new teams.
“Sports players need those high salaries because their careers are so short compared with other professions, and/or because they ought to be compensated for the high likelihood of injury.” There’s three things I’d say to that. First I’d reiterate that on the whole, each of these sports attracted a healthy amount of talent and public interest before there were millions of dollars on the table for players. Second, I assume the players’ union wouldn’t simply evaporate, and that players would almost certainly campaign for some form of compensation to mitigate loss of earnings due to injuries. Third, in cases (such as NFL-style football) where not only career-ending but life-threatening injuries are relatively common, we need to recognize that as a huge, separate problem with the potential to end the sport altogether — keeping salaries high is not a real solution to that kind of problem.
