It’s hardly surprising, given how lengthy working days, long commutes and having both parents in the labour force have combined with the way we raise our children to create suburban neighbourhoods that are empty more than half the day, with scarcely a neighbour to encounter, let alone recognize, trust or befriend. But, however powerful the economic and social forces behind the disappearing neighbour—and however positive many of its results—according to reams of new research, the transformation is also poisoning our politics and, quite literally, killing us.
In a 2005 episode of This American Life, titled “A Little Bit of Knowledge”, we hear the story of an electrician, who, despite being fairly smart, nonetheless deludes himself into thinking he has disproved Einstein’s theory of relativity. The fact that he’s reasonably intelligent makes it all the harder for him to see his own error, even when confronted by actual experts.
Bob Berenz: All right, in this point I have to be completely honest. I did write a paper early on, and I submitted it to a physics site. And it was summarily rejected out of hand. But I did learn an important lesson, that physicists and what’s being done by them is very complicated, very mathematically intensive. What I’ve got is none of that, so it completely, almost in reverse, goes over their heads.”
Whenever his theory is challenged, Bob’s response is to reject the messenger as being narrow-minded or unintelligent. In fact, of course, Bob is the one whose mind is not quite up to the task he has set for himself. But he can’t allow himself even to suspect this. In this episode’s narrative, Bob goes from brushing off simple, obvious clues to his own crackpottedness (the rejection of his paper) to dismissing direct personal demonstrations of his ideas’ incorrectnesses. Even after a PhD in nuclear physics takes time to meet with him and explain what’s wrong with his theories, Bob comes away totally unfazed.
Bob Berenz: Well, this is not really fair, but I’m going to say it anyway. It’s like he [Dr. Brant Watson] was talking the party line. He didn’t strike me as being all that bright. I know he has a couple of patents, and he’s this big professor, and it’s probably not fair for me to say that, but I’m not claiming to be this incredible genius in this one area. It’s very simple what I ran into. And I need some help to get it put into a forum where people can understand it. But it really isn’t that difficult.
I listened to all this with great interest, because I fear that I myself might be just like Bob. In fact, I waver between thinking I am in danger of becoming like Bob, and thinking I have been like Bob for years and am just now realizing it. I have big, long-nursed theories of my own about subjects I have no formal training in, and I even write & tweet on those subjects, with few to no disclaimers.1
When an idea captivates your imagination, you can’t really do anything but ponder it, discuss it, write about it, and live it out — at least, not until another idea captivates it even more strongly. And there, I hope, is where Bob and I part company: because while he will not even admit the possibility of a new idea displacing his old ones, that possibility is deeply appealing to me. In fact I genuinely enjoy being proven wrong much more than the feeling of being proven apparently correct. In that moment there is a kind of clarity that is real and rare. I may put up a fight and kick a lot of tires before I get there, but really this is because I want that clarity: to know I’m wrong, and not to have to go on just suspecting I’m wrong.
I regret that I don’t have (or don’t know that I have) the direct knowledge or tools to construct with certainty my ideas on theology, metaphysics or economics; I fear I will never have them. But being, thankfully, aware of this shortcoming, I can do no other than to explore these ideas with humility and the hope of further discovery; and I invite my readers to humour me, and join with me in the same spirit.
Time Magazine featured this video on July 4th, in a stub article that added little more than “this looks incredible.” And it does look pretty good, especially invested with the sound of Con te Partiro sung in Bocelli’s beautiful voice.
But I couldn’t help but think of the symbolism of this, especially from the audience’s standpoint on the ground.
Imagine it: the sky lit with a classic fireworks display, the “rockets bursting in air”; and through it, gliding silently, the tiny silhouette of an unmanned drone with cameras pointing in every direction. Truly a fitting sign for our time.
Building on the first piece in this series (Your Choice) I describe how, given a particular set of (extremely complex) desires and a particular set of (extremely complex) circumstances, the story of a life, of all lives, is fixed from the beginning to the end. Your whole life really is a book, already fully-written. You can’t see the outcome, simply because of the overwhelming number of factors you don’t know about; but the outcome is really there, nonetheless. You have, right now, an inevitable fate — the result of a co-conspiracy between your surroundings and your own nature.
…one of my alerts alerted me to this book series, about which I know nothing except that Serafini contributed illustrations. I contacted the publisher asking for more info, and in the course of emailing about my collecting habit, he asked if I wanted him to get Serafini to sign my copies. Lucky break, right? Well, what I didn’t expect was full-page inscriptions bearing my name, rendered in Serafini’s made-up language from the Codex Seraphinianus. I was literally short of breath when I opened these books and realized what I had.
This writing system is asemic, meaning it has no specific semantic content. In 2009, in a talk to the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles, Serafini expressed this sentiment1:
The book creates a feeling of illiteracy which, in turn, encourages
imagination, like children seeing a book: they cannot yet read it, but they
realise that it must make sense (and that it does in fact make sense to
grown-ups) and imagine what its meaning must be… The writing of the
Codex is a writing, not a language, although it conveys the impression of
being one. It looks like it means something, but it does not; it is free from
the cage of a language and a syntax. It involves a visual process, not a
linguistic process. (Prodi 2009)
This is another effect of “new orthographies” that I hadn’t considered. They allow us to re-experience this childlike mystery of encounters with writing in a way that simply reading other languages in a Western alphabet does not.
This aphorism came to me while reading Vicky Chico’s Genomic Negligence. In the context of working through the role of value in autonomy, Chico discusses the split between ‘first order volition’ (desiring to do something) and ‘second order volition’ (“wanting a desire to be one’s will”). Chico writes
the essential characteristic of a wanton is that his desires move him to do certain things, without it being true of him that he wants to be moved by those desires or that he prefers to be moved by other desires. Authentic choices will, however, reflect what the individual deeply values as opposed to what she, perhaps thoughtlessly, desires. (p 66)
Corporations are persons; the creation of a distinct artificial legal person is and always has been the meaning and the point of the corporate form. …The judgment today maintains that a closely-held corporation like Hobby Lobby is so close to the natural persons behind it that it’s not really a distinct corporate person at all; it’s just a costume that the Green family puts on and takes off as it suits them.
…But the entity that is Hobby Lobby, a for-profit corporation like IBM, can’t be described as itself having a religious belief. Making sense of that idea requires making the corporate person disappear from the description and talking about the Green family, treating the “closely held” corporation as if it were a partnership or sole proprietorship that doesn’t have a corporate-style separateness from the natural persons. Try as I might, I can’t persuade myself that that’s right.
I had some initial thoughts on today’s Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court.
The most prominent of these thoughts was this: If business owners want to opt out of certain laws for religious reasons, they should be required to file as sole proprietorships (vs. corporations).
After reading more about the decision, I find that there’s really nothing in it I care to comment about, nothing that I have strong opinions on. But I will talk specifically about the thinking behind my comment above.
First of all let’s talk about corporations vs. sole proprietorships.
“Corporations”, are, of course, a legal invention. In an ordinary world, I’m responsible for my own stuff, my own dealings with people, and my own actions. When I die, the stuff gets divvied up and becomes someone else’s problem/responsibility. A business run this way is known as a sole proprietorship.
At some point we decided that there might be some benefits to treating a business as separate from its owners. So we invented corporations. Now, instead of being directly responsible for my own stuff, and dealings with people, I can create a stack of papers (a “corporation”) that says that these things are now ultimately not my problem:
The business’s stuff is now owned by the corporation, not by me
I’m not personally liable for whatever bad happens. If someone sues the corporation, my personal assets can’t be used to satisfy any judgments against it.
Of course, a big feature of corporations is that they allow for multiple part-owners. But it’s important to remember: all of this still holds true even if I’m the only shareholder. Note that in this case there’s no actual difference in the way I run the business. It’s still me running it, controlling the assets, hiring and firing employees. The only difference is the presence or absence of corporate documents. Without them, I’m ultimately personally responsible for all of this stuff; but with them, I’m not.
Obviously in order to invent something that’s not “real” (corporations), the government has to commit to making and enforcing a lot of additional rules. We’re OK with that because there are economic benefits that flow from allowing businesses to exist in perpetuity, be owned by multiple shareholders, shielding owners from personal liability and so forth. And we’ve gotten used to those benefits.
But it’s not a free lunch for the government or the public either, because there are also big problems that come with the existence of corporations. For example, without additional regulation, corporations would have an incentive to lie about their own financial health, inflating their value until the whole thing evaporates, causing massive losses for shareholders. Corporations in many markets would also have both the capability and the incentive to merge with each other until competition becomes effectively impossible.
So not only does government have to invent and uphold the rules allowing for the existence of corporations themselves, it also has to invent and enforce all kinds of extra regulation (securities law, anti-trust law, labor law, etc.) to limit the downsides of corporations.
In the example of my own hypothetical business: if I decide to create a corporate entity for it instead of running it as a sole proprietorship, the government basically says: “OK, you can have limited personal liability, and the business can exist in perpetuity. But in exchange for all the hassle you’re causing us, we’re going to tax you differently, especially if the business grows to any significant size.” So the government and I make this tradeoff, and we agree that there’s now this new legal thing “Joel, Inc.”, that’s not me, that owns the business’s stuff, and that takes the hit for any business liabilities.
So now finally getting back to the Hobby Lobby case. If congress enacts some law that applies to all corporations but that also genuinely bothers me in my heart of hearts (i.e., I would feel complicit in some moral evil if I followed it), what might I do?
If I were like the owners of Hobby Lobby, I would say, “this law violates my corporation’s conscience.” — Not my conscience, but the corporation’s. Because remember, the business is now this separate legal being that shields me from liability.
My big question, and the question many others have had, is this: what exactly does it mean for an abstract legal entity to have a conscience? Especially when that legal fiction’s main purpose is shield individual business owners from personal responsibility?
Remember, this corporation’s existence as a corporation is enabled solely by government regulation and intervention in the market. Without this regulation, there are no corporations, and business owners go back to being personally responsible for their business’s practices.
All of the above seems to me more or less incontrovertible.
Now, my personal opinion is that a corporation, being an abstract thing we all imagine based on documents and legal agreements, cannot really be said to have a conscience. People have consciences (and those need to be respected), but corporations do not.
My further opinion is that if you feel a deep need to exempt your business from certain laws based on the dictates of your conscience, you should be able to do so.
But if you’re going to claim that your conscience makes you so personally responsible for some detail of your business that a law should not apply to it, you also make yourself personally responsible for every aspect of your business: you should run it as a sole proprietor (or as a general partnership).
In other words, if you’re going to create a faceless legal being that shields you from personal responsibility in every other area of the company’s operation, it’s not reasonable to claim that the dictates of your conscience somehow pierce through that shield in any one specific area.
So much for my opinion. The legal reality in this country is that Congress (via the Religious Freedom Restoration Act ) and the Supreme Court (in this and other decisions) have effectively decided that legal abstractions like corporations can have consciences too.
The main effect of this is simply to make room for the kind of hypocrisy I outlined above, and which we see in the owners of Hobby Lobby. Again: Hobby Lobby’s owners make use of a corporate business structure in large measure to be able to legally disclaim personal responsibility in just about every area of their business, but have decided a certain law ought not to apply to them because of their personal responsibility.
At this point, Hobby Lobby’s owners don’t legally have to do anything differently. But if they wanted to follow their consciences without being schmucks and hypocrites, they would dismantle their corporate structure and instead operate in a way that legally does make them personally responsible — and liable — for every area of their business.
In my ideal world (or at least, my idea of a better world than the one we have), the RFRA would have been clearly written apply to individuals and not to abstract legal entities.
The legal system should allow for business owners to follow their consciences, but should not allow them to use this freedom to exempt themselves from certain laws while at the same time using a government-subsidized legal invention to shield them from all other personal responsibility.
