Piece of Peace

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I had a discussion today with a Christian who finds contradiction between the Great Commission and Christian participation in the military and any branch of civil government that involves the opportunity to harm another human being physically. He did not say if indirect harm from terrible governance was something to be similarly loathed, but this is perhaps another topic.

The first Christian who was also in a military was a centurion. Of course, when a military is commanded to kill Christians, it would be far from a Christian calling to enter into its service, but this particular centurion lived before those days. After the persecution, Christians filled the ranks of the military once again, bringing with them Christian virtue. We find Christian restraint in the medieval era as Muslims invade territory after territory in endless pillaging. Only after many years did Christians deem it necessary to strike back in defense and reclamation of what was stolen from them. We call those strikes the crusades.

It seemed, to the greatest minds in Christian history, that combat and Christ were not opposed. Certainly, for a God who came to earth as a man in order to divide and ultimately conquer, combat cannot be inherently evil. For a God who demanded the utter destruction of ancient pagans, warfare could not be a sin. God does not change and He is perfect. If He deems warfare and combat appropriate in some contexts, they cannot be fundamentally wrong, or God would have demanded evil to be done in obedience.

This does not justify all combat, no more than that charity being a virtue justifies giving drink to a drunkard. Warfare and violence take on moral shape by their means and their end. This shape can be the dark and hellish pit of sin if killing is done for pleasure and the unjust pursuit of your neighbor’s property. However, it can take the virtuous shape of courage and manliness when you defend your neighbor against such an attack. Courage and bravery, in fact, are virtues that demand a battlefield. That the battlefield is distasteful to some is of no consequence; the battlefield will exist on Earth until the very last of days, and it is right that a man should enter into it when necessary; best that he enter it with no intent to overstay his welcome. He is a healthy and virtuous man, in fact, who seeks to leave the battlefield as early as possible, but who is wise enough to know that the limits of the battlefield are determined by where he decides to stand. To put it vividly, a man who refuses to fight in defense of the borders of his country behind ramparts will soon be defending against his will from his own bedroom window behind curtains.

The world wars have made the reality of warfare’s encroaching nature even more apparent. Should the nations of the world have decided to bow to the will of the Axis powers, millions more would have perished than died during the war. Hundreds of millions perhaps. It takes a virtuous man to risk his life and his conscience in killing an enemy soldier. An army of virtuous men can stop an army of evil men, but an army of cowards can only stand by as entire nations are slaughtered. This is not to say all pacifists are cowards, but certainly all cowards are pacifists the moment they are at risk of suffering. While to a pacifist there is paradox in spreading the Gospel while being willing to defend what is good and virtuous, to most healthy-minded men, there is no such paradox and the two are made for one another. For anything truly loved is truly worth defending. The real paradox is that pacifists only enjoy the peace that real men have fought for, for they can fight for no peace of their own. Those soldiers, real men to the core, are even more manly for letting the pacifists do so without whining about how unfair it all is – and unfair it certainly is.

While a pacifist may be virtuous, he is not virtuous in condemning the soldier for being a soldier. Each may serve a different purpose, but one is not superior to the other. The problem arises when the pacifist considers the soldier to be a moral degenerate, and thus becomes one himself.

(Super) Basic Economics

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If there is one topic today which stands above the rest in terms of profound and pervasive misunderstanding, it is religion. If we skip that one, we have history. Then probably philosophy. Then science. The list is pretty exhaustive. Somewhere, probably nine or ten categories of human knowledge down the line, we’ll bump into that only partially familiar concept of economics. Webster gives us this only mildly helpful definition of economics:

a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services

The problem with the term “social science” is that it puts a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who believes in objective reality (and if you don’t believe in object reality, are you certain you are even reading this?) Social science typically brings to mind visions of survey taking students and the overzealous college faculty who analyze those surveys to the detriment of society by drawing far too many conclusions from far too little data. But economics isn’t like this at all. Economics is a very simple concept which predates modern science and is certainly far more coherent than any so-called social science you could think of.

Economics derives from the Greek “oikonomikos”, which has in mind the notion of managing a household. Still, this doesn’t tell us everything that the topic might entail, and it entails a great deal. In this post I’d like to examine a few of the most basic concepts of economics that everyone seems to get wrong.

Wealth and Stuff

Wealth is the central concern of economics. To clarify, the production and transfer of wealth is the central concern of economics. Some silly modern economists like to forget that the production of wealth is just as important to economics as its transfer, and they often talk about silly notions instead as if economics were a zero-sum game, with X wealth in the world and no way to generate more. Just where X wealth came from instead of 0 wealth is not a welcome question in such circles, I am sure, but I digress.

Wealth comes in a variety of forms, but is really given its value by two things: supply and demand. This most basic of economic principles is often ignored, but should still be emphasized: As demand increases and supply decreases, the value of some good or service increases. As demand decreases and supply increases, the value of some good or service decreases. This holds true regardless of any other circumstance. It is easy, upon hearing of this rule, to forget one aspect of economics that is fundamentally important: that “demand” we just looked at is produced by both the wants and needs of real life people. It is ultimately people, then, that influence the value of a good or service.

Money is directly related to wealth. Money is a proxy. That is, instead of me producing cheese to give to Bob who produces paper that I need and forming a barter agreement, I can produce cheese for anyone who wants it and buy paper from Bob even when he doesn’t want cheese. Money simply allows wealth to be fluid, instead of static. It allows buyers and sellers to easily buy and sell as they choose. The value of money is influenced by 1. How much money is in the marketplace (more money = less value), and 2. How much money people are willing to spend most of the time. This means it can be difficult to determine the exact monetary value of a good or service, because there are a ton of factors. However, the first source of value directly influences the latter, though it is easier to summarize the entire situation by saying that the value of a good or service – in monetary terms – is determined by the overwhelming number of transactions that occur.

If a ton of people buy a product for more money than you are willing to pay, you’ll just have to increase your asking price. If a ton of people are buying a product for less than you are willing to pay, you might drive up the price but you’ll certainly get the product. And so forth. At this point, everything is just an exercise in logic.

More Complicated Stuff

Okay, all the pieces are in place. We have wealth, which is essentially the goods or services we can produce or own, and we have money, which represents goods and services due to an overwhelmingly large number of transactions. We have supply and demand and all of the laws that follow. Everything is good.

There are a couple of other topics I would consider basic to the knowledge of economics. The first is debt. Not everyone is capable of producing enough goods and services to acquire the goods and services they desire at a particular moment. In those cases, people who have produced more (those with more money) can loan those who have produced less (those with less money) some of their assets, assuming they will eventually repay them with interest. Interest is nothing more than a motivator to get people to lend money; without this, there would be no lending of money as there would be no reason to do so (lending =/= charity). Going into debt is usually inadvisable, by the way.

Investments are related to debt, but only sort of. Investments work by having a person who is slowing producing more and more (by controlling a company, for instance), and who could use outside sources of money to purchase the goods and services (capital and labor) that he needs to expand further. He isn’t hoping for your charity however. You see, in exchange for this investment, you’ll receive partial ownership in the company, either in the form of control, dividends, or just plain investment returns, which are created by his using your money to grow his business.

One final concept is insurance, which is one of the least understood areas of economics that exists. Insurance, boiled down to its most essential components, is nothing more than a gambling system that tends to benefit everyone involved. For a fee, you pay into a pot of money along with a ton of other people. The pot is intended to cover the cost of creating an insurance company, paying its staff, and, primarily, to cover any expenses you might have to pay for an extremely expensive (but extremely rare) emergency. The more common the emergency or the more expensive it is, the higher the fees, by definition. This is not an unfair practice; it is simply the only way that insurance works. Insurance is ideally designed for rare situations where few people are ever going to need the money. It is terribly suited for things you can expect to pay for.

Then suddenly, Government!

Now that the basics of economics have been laid out, there are a couple of areas that get to be muddled up by the benevolent and always-thinking-of-us government we have. Minimum wage is one of these muddlings that occurs. Remember that value is defined ultimately by what people are willing to pay for a good or service, and it is determined thus by supply, demand, and quantity of a currency in the market. Well, minimum wage takes this basic idea and says “screw it”. Honest. Minimum wage tells a person that the service they perform is, instead of the X that society has determined it to be, X + 5 instead. Now, for the first paycheck these minimum wage folks take home, this is great! But, the service being performed by minimum wage folks still has the value of X. They aren’t suddenly producing more or working harder (usually). The market will adjust – the market being the collective supply and demand of all people buying and selling goods and services. Ultimately, the relative value of X + 5 against all goods and services will be just what X used to be. It will have the same buying power. This is inevitable. It is demonstrable. And while it ultimately doesn’t change anything for the minimum wage folks in the long run, it does have the effect of a minor earthquake for the economy, which ends up displacing and hurting people for the benefit of the votes of a few uneducated people.

If this sounds harsh, just think through it logically for a moment. Suppose what you do for a living is work at a fast food place, and your manager pays you $9 for your work. Pretty good. But minimum wage is bumped up to $11. Tell me, what matters more to the economy, the number that comes after the “$” sign, or the amount of work you do? Remember, the value that comes after the “$” is determined by the economy, so it would be circular to say it goes the other way around. To arbitrarily change this value is simply to shock the economic system in place with new values for every good and service to compensate. This is called inflation, and while it is produced by a number of things, minimum wage is partially responsible for it. In fact, inflation is all that minimum wage produces on a long-term scale. Oh, and votes. Don’t forget the votes. Very important.

Universal health insurance is another silly notion with unintended consequences (politicians are famous for destroying more in unintended consequences than they create, but this would take a series of books even to outline). Remember that insurance covers a small number of people from having to pay extremely large fees for extremely rare circumstances. Universal health insurance abolishes this. Instead, everyone is covered for every condition. This means there is absolutely no incentive whatsoever to pay for anything of your own money or to try to earn enough to do so, as might previously have been the case in our imperfect, but still wonderful healthcare system. Insurance, which depends upon rare circumstances, is now being forced on situations that occur expectedly (granted, this occurred even before government-mandated health insurance; it will just get worse now). When a situation arises that includes expected and routine costs, insurance is a terrible candidate to help pay for those things: a marketplace with competing goods and services is much better suited. We don’t have much of a chance for that option at this point, but it would have been the way to go.

I’ll Shut Up Now

That’s about it for a basic introduction to economics and a couple of the silly things the government does without such a basic introduction being readily assimilated into the minds of politicians and citizens alike. Economics is fun to poke around in precisely because it is, fundamentally, logical in most ways. While you could study with SocialScience™, that terrible and malevolent form of grant-money grabbing enterprise, you could much more easily just think rationally about the basic ideas of money, value, wealth, supply, and demand, and end up with a far more helpful predictive method and summary of what you can observe.

Purpose and Work

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As a software engineer, I spend a considerable amount of time every day trying to determine which solution should be used to solve a particular problem. It did not take long from the start of my education in Computer Science to start asking questions of problems that went far beyond the daily situations I’d encounter. Where most students would ask “what is the latest way to do this thing I want to do?” or “how could I optimize this functionality?”, I would ask questions of the “why should I be doing any of this?” variety.

“Why” questions in the technology world are generally pushed outward to a few predefined and limited answers and generally boil down to:

  1. For personal satisfaction.
  2. To help someone accomplish something faster/easier.
  3. To help someone accomplish something new.
  4. For profit.
  5. Stop asking dumb questions.

Certainly we can all grasp the answers and understand them, but do they really answer the question of why we ought to make any technological progress? I don’t think so. Personal satisfaction can be had in other ways, some of which are better at personal enlightenment or edification. Helping people do something faster or easier is just as often a creator of problems as it is a solver of one, and it is certainly not inherently virtuous. Helping people accomplish something new is again not inherently virtuous, but is inherently more dangerous that just speeding up or simplifying an old activity. Profit is the hardest to argue with, but profit alone is not morally virtuous; it is on its own a neutral concept.

This is not to say that I oppose creating or inventing new technology as a matter of practice. I undoubtedly wait longer to adopt a new piece of technology than most and often never do (I refuse to own a smart phone), but it is not my rule to hate technological advancement by any means. I simply don’t find value in a constant pursuit of it for a couple of reasons. First of all, I believe the highest activity to which humans find their natural end is the knowledge of God and molding of oneself to this fact. I believe the second highest activity is in producing, raising, and teaching the next generation. Neither of those things are made easier by technology, but are in fact made much more difficult because of distraction and misinformation. I think of the myriad pieces of false information online against the abundance of knowledge in books that no one reads anymore because they are not accompanied by interactive illustrations.

The second reason I don’t value this pursuit is that it is exhausting far beyond its reward. Take smart phones for instance. Smart phones provide a number of useful features. At times, I’ve taken advantage of those features on the phones my friends own. The technology behind smart phones, however, is constantly changing, and phones are outdated within a year, sometimes within six months. The new features never transform the phone itself, but if you want to be on the bleeding edge of technology, you have to upgrade anyway. What you’ll receive for it is usually not worth the price or the time, let alone the advertising we all endure. Not worth it, that is, if by “worth” we mean more than entertainment value.

These two facts often contradict my profession; a profession that demands a pursuit of the latest and greatest technological advances. I don’t have a problem learning new technologies or developing new tools. My issue primarily lies in the long-term aspects of my work. Despite all the day-to-day interesting problems which require solving in a software engineering position, the question of ultimate purpose must always be asked. So far, the only long-term motivation for staying in a software engineering position that I am aware of is the financial benefit and the intellectual stimulation. As to the two highest ends of my existence – the pursuit of God and the creation and expansion of a family – it is the financial benefit that is most important, while the stimulation simply keeps it interesting.

I am still working through the implications of the contradiction and will continue to write on the topic. I think it is important considering the technological aspirations of our era.

The Equality of Sexlessness

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The Equality of Sexlessness
G. K. Chesterton

In almost all the modern opinions of women it is curious to observe how many lies have to be assumed before a case can be made. A young lady flies from England to Australia; another wins an air race; a Duchess creates a speed record in reaching India; others win motoring trophies; and now the King’s prize for marksmanship has gone to a woman. All of which is very interesting and possibly praiseworthy as means of spending one’s leisure time; and if it were left to that, even if no more were added than the perfectly plain fact that such feats could not have been achieved by their mothers and grandmothers, we would be content to doff our hats to the ladies with all courtesy and respect which courage, endurance and ability have always rightly demanded.

But it is not left to that; and considerably more is added. It is suggested, for example, that the tasks were beyond the mothers and grandmothers, nor for the very obvious reason that they had no motorcars and airplanes in which to amuse their leisure hours, but because women were then enslaved by the convention of natural inferiority to man. Those days, we are told, “in which women were held incapable of positive social achievements are gone forever.” It does not seem to have occurred to this critic that the very fact of being a mother or grandmother indicates a certain positive social achievement; the achievement of which, indeed, probably left little leisure for travelling airily about the hemispheres. The same critic goes on to state, with all the solemn emphasis of profound thought, that “the important thing is not that women are the same as men — that is a fallacy — but that they are just as valuable to society as men. Equality of citizenship means that there are twice as many heads to solve present-day problems as there were to solve the problems of the past. And two heads are better than one.” And the dreadful proof of the modern collapse of all that was meant by man and wife and the family council, is that this sort of imbecility can be taken seriously.

The London Times, in a studied leading article, points out that the first emancipators of women (whoever they were) had no idea what lay in store for future generations. “Could they have foreseen it they might have disarmed much opposition by pointing to the possibilities, not only of freedom, but of equality and fraternity also.”

And we ask, what does it all mean? What in the name of all that is graceful and dignified does fraternity with women mean? What nonsense, or worse, is indicated by the freedom and equality of the sexes?

We mean something quite definite when we speak of a man being a little free with the ladies. What definite freedom is meant when the freedom of women is proposed? If it merely means the right to free opinions, the right to vote independently of fathers and husbands, what possible connection does it have with the freedom to fly to Australia or score bulls-eyes at Bisley? If it means, as we fear it does, freedom from responsibility of managing a home and a family, an equal right with men in business and social careers, at the expense of home and family, then such progress we can only call progressive deterioration.

And for men too, there is, according to a famous authoress, a hope of freedom. Men are beginning to revolt, we are told, against the old tribal custom of desiring fatherhood. The male is casting off the shackles of being a creator and a man. When all are sexless there will be equality. There will be no women and no men. There will be but a fraternity, free and equal. The only consoling thought is that it will endure but for one generation.

–From GK’s Weekly, July 26, 1930

All I can add to this is that Chesterton was profoundly capable of something few writers ever have been: seeing things as they are and then, while writing on the insight, being both relevant to his time and prophetic of the future.

An Open Letter

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Dear Reader,

I might know you, and I might not, but I already know something about you and I that makes us similar: neither of us is without sin. We have both committed crimes of cosmic significance against a perfect standard carried out by a Perfect Judge. We are incapable of doing any less, because we are broken by our very nature. It isn’t that if we try hard enough that we’ll somehow overcome this natural problem. Of course, some of our problems may be solved with medicine or some other invention, but our nature is not something so easily swayed. It would take a miracle to change it. Thankfully, we have a miracle.

No one can make you accept this miracle, just as no one can make you accept that you are not without sin. That is something you’ll have to come to terms with on your own. It should be obvious to you, though, that something isn’t right about yourself and the world around you; that peace has never lasted forever, that falsehood is often claimed as truth, that evil is pervasive, etc.

Dear Reader, the worst thing I could do (or any Christian for that matter) would be to ignore all of this. The worst thing I could do, the most unloving thing, would be to tell you that you’re okay and I’m not in a position to tell you whether you have sinned or not. The simple fact is that I know we have both sinned, and not telling you is simply lying to you. My personality often comes off strongly, but that doesn’t mean I am happy about having to tell you the truth of the matter. I’d rather have that cup pass me by. I’d rather someone else take my place, but I do not want to lie to you when that place is mine.

If you are not a Christian, I would implore you to become one. If you are already a Christian, I would implore you to stay true to the faith, conforming your feelings to it. We are often told to follow our hearts or that how we feel about something defines the reality of it, but nothing could be farther from the truth. There is nothing inherently good or trustworthy about our feelings. As CS Lewis put it:

“Don’t bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behaviour.”

It would be uncaring, unloving for me (or you) to withhold the obvious judgment of sin from another and simply accept it all. If I truly care for anyone else, it certainly means I care more for them than I do for their feelings. You are more than your feelings, and your feelings are your weakest part; they are the most easily swayed, and they are the least trustworthy.

Dear Reader, whether you know me or not, you can expect this to be my attitude as often as I can make it, for it is the ideal attitude that I strive for: To love you enough to love the whole you, not just your feelings. That means we might argue and it means you might come to have a highly negative opinion of me. It means I will likely hurt your feelings and that people who value peace more than Truth might get mad at me and call me names for doing so. But it won’t change the things that love demands, and it won’t change whether or not I carry those demands out.

This is the Christian position on the matter. It is harder than hatred, which cannot love, and apathy also, which ignores sin sinfully by disguising itself as love. The Christian position is the one in which I cannot ignore sin but also can’t stop loving the person committing it. It means I can’t, in good conscience, accept your sin as a part of who you are and simply ignore it, but can’t ignore you either just because it is easier. It means your character matters to me, but so to your mind, body, and spirit, and I refuse to separate them but to love you and reject your sin. It is the hardest of all positions to take, but it is the only correct one. I assure you I will fail to live up to this ideal, but it is what I strive for. I hope to God you strive for the same with me and don’t let me off easily when I pursue what is wrong because it is easier for you or because you believe it will cause me emotional trauma. My soul is more important than my feelings, and so is yours.

Dear Reader, keep this in mind, should our paths ever cross.