I'm just libertarian enough...

to find this funny :)

(FYI the Boston Globe runs an excellent weekly editorial cartoon roundup in which you also can find such jewels)

Adunare (fresh back from the most eastern point in North America)

The Future Beckons

And apparently it's going to involve woolly mammoths with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads ... (via Ross Douthat).

Slumming

In yesterday's post Kawasaki talked about sharing the pain when it's time to lay off staff. Take a salary cut. Do something. 

Along similar lines (but kinda opposite), Detroit automaker CEOs are taking heat for dropping upwards of 20 gs on a trip to ask the US gov for money to save their cash-strapped companies.

See here.

Boy does this look sloppy.

The End of Wall Street

The problems that plagued Wall Street were variously cast in the last American election as individual greed and deregulation. The solution - it seems to me - lies somewhere in between. A provocative piece I enjoyed this morning on The End of Wall Street, by Michael Lewis of Liar's Poker fame. Favorite quote:

It's all laissez-faire until you get in deep shit

The Messy Business of Leadership

Guy Kawasaki, a Christian as well as a big name in the venture capital world, wrote an interesting article on the 'Art of laying people off'. I think it's a subject that takes a lot of courage to address, and for the most part, Kawasaki covers it well. 

Some of us may one day find ourselves serving our organizations from the top. Should that ever happen, I think this article has some wisdom to offer, helping manage a bad situation.

Two of the 12 points I'll share:

Take responsibility. Ultimately, it is the CEO’s decision to make the cuts, so don’t blame it on the board of directors, market conditions, competition, or whatever else. In effect, she should simply say, “I made the decision. This is what we’re going to do.” If you don’t have the courage to do this, don’t be a CEO. Now, more than ever, the company will need a leader, and leaders accept responsibility.

Share the pain. When people around you are losing their jobs, you can share the pain, too. Cut your pay. In fact, the higher the employee, the bigger the percentage of pay reduction. Take a smaller office. Turn in the company car. Reassign your personal assistant to a revenue-generating position. Fly coach. Stay in motels. Sell the boxseat tickets to the ball game. Give your 30-inch flat-panel display to a programmer who could use it to debug faster. Do something, however symbolic.

The rest can be read here

"The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice" If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life." Life has never been normal." It has always been an uncertain mix of greatness and misery, joy and heartache, long-term plans and sudden disasters.

Here. See also, here

A Christian Theory of Public Policy

I was reflecting with a colleague recently that the great challenge of the contemporary Christian university student is how to practice leadership - where the word has become abused as a sort of catch all for charisma or clear minded thinking. Leadership, he defined for me, was about being able to make a decision, when the choices seem equal. Don't talk to me about making the choice between the obviously right and wrong - he said - a child can do that! If we are serious about moral formation we must do more than train ourselves (and our students) to make the right call, we must learn how to make the tough call, to weigh it morally, and wisely, with rich resources and deep prayer - but to make it indeed.

I am especially impressed with Stephen Garber's idea of proximate justice. It belies the easy idealist puritanism of Christian youth. In the words of my colleague, if you're going to play in the sandbox you're going to get dirty. Absolute purity is a pursuit, not a state, and in its pursuit we must guard our integrity - negotiate as best we can the contradictions of life and our belief.

I find my own moral wisdom in short supply. I am impatient, at times arrogant, and look for the obvious right and wrong. I can always find that angle, because the (mis)information always exists for the uneducated to narrowly judge a complex problem - international politics is rife with it.

What are some of the resources at hand to ameliorate this? I want to suggest - and would love to hear feedback - that one of the best resources thinking Christians in public policy have is just war theory. Just War gives us resources to help think through how to take an unpleasant, broken, piecemeal action - how to morally and wisely weigh the contradictions, and then nevertheless to act.

The missing link for Christians in policy - in my opinion - is just such a broad based theory of policy: sophisticated theological tools that can be used to read, weigh, and provide decision making capacity to an idealist generation.

Could Just War be a departure for developing a Christian theory of public policy in a liberal democratic society?

Voter Abstinence

And for something a little lighter, care of a good friend:

An Economy that Doesn't Deserving Bailing Out?

I was reviewing the Uni student newspaper where I teach part-time and got very annoyed by a passing headline, "An Economy that Doesn't Deserve Bailing Out". David Brooks - one of my favorite New York Times columnists - summarizes nicely why I think this kind of cold hearted and isolating cynicism is profoundly inappropriate in thinking Christians.

In his piece today on The Formerly Middle Class Brooks aptly notes that some people think recession is good because it means a moral revival - that Americans will learn to live without material extravagance and simplify their lives, rediscovering "home, friends and family".

This is a very naive impression of 'recession', and betrays the fundamental political, economic and cultural illiteracy of Christian moralists. Recessions breed more than Wendell Berry's idealist agrarianism - they breed pessimism. Birthrates drop and suicide rates rise. Recessions are about fear, and diminished expectations.

Brooks argues that it is the recently mobile middle class that will feel it, especially in developing economies where millions of people have climbed out of poverty. This recession is pushing them back down. What kind of form will this disillusionment take? Will it be the populism and nativism of the 1880s and 1890s, with the apocalyptic forebodings and collectivist movements crushing individual rights? Or the cynicism of the 1970s when Bretton Woods fell apart, and the oil shock rocked the global economy? Presciently Brooks asks, "will the Obama administration spend much of its time battling a global protest movement that doesn't even exist yet"?

It will not merely the material deprivations that will bite, but the loss of social identity, networks, status symbols and social order. Naive young undergraduates can have the luxury of bemoaning a consumerist North American capitalism which is "finally getting what it deserves", but my heart breaks when I hear them disassociate themselves from their politics, their culture, and their nation - as though somehow they bear no common responsibility to pursue justice in the public sphere. Real people, with real loves and desires are being hurt, and spiraling into psychological and social cacoons - people are afraid and alone, and we're gloating.

Shame on us.

Private Identity in Public Space

Why anonymity?

Privacy, a recent Calgary Herald article argued, has never been more vigorously protected by legislation than it is today and yet it is clear that the distinction between private and public worlds is rapidly eroding.

In the past it was fairly clear what was public and what was private. The latter was either never shared with others, or only with close friends. Public words were spoken to influence groups of people; they were recorded, and they were judged.

No one expects to be judged on a private thought. Even so the virtual world - with its artificial catalysts of intimacy - has exploded with private thoughts turned public. Private opinion has never been more public. Cyberspace cultivates an artificial intimacy that encourages a radical disclosure - but this is absolutely disingenuous. Virtual information is never lost.

Why protect private identities in a public space, especially a space dedicated to topics of public conversation? First, Google tells all. Those writing in this space are not just academics testing out intellectual theories, they are professionals with careers ranging from pastoring, to teaching, marketing to public policy. We want a space to ask tough questions - not just publicly acceptable ones - a space in which to contest important ideas, not just the safe ones, a place to be genuine, and thus not always public. The shield here is not from responsibility - how could that be if all the writers involved know and trust one another? - but from the toxic conflation of private and public conversation. What we write here are not op-eds for daily periodicals, and so they should not be read as such. Here there is space for reflection, debate and honesty that a 24 hr news cycle, and instant Internet opinion could never find - that people who had reputations to defend, public relations to keep up, and careers to husband might not otherwise have.

If we can't put our reflections into words we can't really understand our thinking. Words do matter. They matter so much, that we need to understand "the difference between private words and public words not to excuse offensive ideas, but to preserve the capacity to understand what offensiveness means, not to mention beauty, wisdom and truth".

Technical Fixes

Friends, you will find the Contributor profiles removed on the left. If you wish to remain anonymous in posting, you will want to change your "Display Name" in blogger profiles. Beyond that, you should no longer find any technical links to your blogger profile. Pax, Adunare.

The Gryphon's Lair

Gryphus significat sapientiam jungendam fortitudini, sed sapientiam debere praeire, fortitudinem sequi

The gryphon is wisdom joined to fortitude, wisdom leading, fortitude following. Here the lair scribes.