Six Reasons We Can't Change The Future Without Progressive Religion

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Sara Robinson

Six Reasons We Can't Change The Future Without Progressive Religion

Often, religion offers much that progressives need to build movements for change.

July 8, 2012  |  

One of the great historical strengths of the progressive movement has been its resolute commitment to the separation of church and state. As progressives, we don't want our government influenced by anybody's religious laws. Instead of superstition and mob id, we prefer to have real science, based in real data and real evidence, guiding public policy. Instead of holy wars, othering, and social repression -- the inevitable by-products of theocracy -- we think that drawing from the widest possible range of philosophical traditions makes America smarter, stronger, and more durable over time.

That said: while we all want a government free of religion, there are good reasons that we may not want our own progressive movement to be shorn of every last spiritual impulse. In fact, the history of the progressive movement has shown us, over and over, that there are things that the spiritual community brings to political movements that are essential for success, and can't easily be replaced with anything else.

Religion has been central to the formation of human communities -- and to how we approach the future -- for as long as homo sapiens has been around. Apart from God-belief (which varies widely between religions), all successful religions thrive and endure because they offer their adherents a variety of effective community-building, social activism, and change management tools that, taken together, make religion quite possibly the most powerful social change technology humans have ever developed.

What does religion offer that progressives need to make our movement work?

First: there's nothing like it if you want to bond a bunch of very diverse people into a tight community of shared meaning and value. A religious congregation brings together people of all ages, backgrounds, educational levels, professional rank, and life circumstances, and melds them into an enduring tribe that's centered around a shared commitment to mutual trust and care, and (most importantly) has a clear and vivid shared vision of the future they're trying to create.

There is simply no other organizational form that encourages people to share their time, energy, and resources so quickly, completely, or enduringly; or aligns so much conviction toward the same goal. (This is why the leaders of corporations, the marketers of sports teams, and the military all study religious cultures, and try to appropriate their tribe-building techniques for their own purposes.) The resulting tribes can last for many centuries -- and acquire a resounding moral voice that can reverberate throughout their larger communities, and well beyond. If you want to change the world, this is the kind of group -- deeply bound by faith, trust, love, history, and a commitment to each other and to the world they envision that transcends life and death -- that's most likely to get it done. Religion is the best way going to get people to consecrate themselves, body and soul, to a larger cause; and to take on the kind of all-or-nothing risks that are often required to really change the world.

Second, religious narratives center people in the long arc of history, telling them where they came from, who they are, what they are capable of, and what kind of future is possible. History does this, too; but religion does it at a deeper, mythic level that gives these stories extra emotional and cognitive resonance. For most of human history, in fact, the task of imagining a different future and giving people the inspiration and courage to reach for it has been the primary role of religious prophets. (So has the job of warning the people that they're wandering into grave error or betraying their own values, and must change their ways or face disaster.) Religion is the native home of the prophetic voice -- the voice that calls people to transformative change. Throughout America's history, our most evocative political prophets -- both Roosevelts, all the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Van Jones, Barack Obama -- have invariably been people who spent a lot of time in the pews, learning to speak the kind of language that calls us to a better place.

Third, over the course of American history, liberal religious faiths have been the primary promoter of progressive values throughout the culture -- and also the leading institution when it came time to inculcate our progressive sensibilities into the next generation. Many, if not most, progressives in America are progressive specifically because they believe that this is what their faith demands of them. They're raising their kids in churches and temples because they believe, as the Bible says, that "if you train up a child in the way that he should go, when he is old, he will not depart from it."

Liberal congregations have etched our values onto the young souls of tens of millions of American progressives, over three centuries and dozens of generations. Do we really want to try to do without them now?

Fourth, progressive religion has always been America's most credible and aggressive front-line defender of non-market-based values against the onslaught of capitalism and greed. In recent years, as the “free-market” fetishists took over (and gulled American Evangelicals into shilling for their hellish utilitarianism), our liberal faith communities -- mainline Protestants and liberal Catholics, Jews and Quakers, Unitarian Universalists and the rising wave of reformist Muslims -- are the strongest remaining cultural forces left with the moral authority to insist that we have a duty to the poor, that democracy cannot survive without a commitment to justice, and that compassion is always a better survival strategy than competition.

The market says: Everything and everybody has a price, and is for sale. Faith says: The most valuable things in our lives -- good health, safe food, strong families, a clean environment, a just economy, meaningful work, access to opportunity -- are beyond price, and should by right be available to us all. Our faith communities (especially, but not always exclusively, the progressive ones) have always held this light up within our culture, and it's never been needed more than it's needed right now.

Fifth, in a nation where over 90% of everybody has some kind of God-belief -- and the overwhelming majority of them ground their political decisions in that belief -- abandoning the entire landscape of faith to the right wing amounts to political malpractice. For most Americans, our religious worldviews are the epistemological soil in which every other decision we make is rooted -- the basic model of reality that we use to navigate the world. When we stopped engaging people's basic model of moral order, we effectively ceded the entire moral landscape of the nation to our enemies. It was, in retrospect, perhaps the most self-destructive error we've made over the past 40 years (and that's saying something).

To our credit, a lot of our best organizers and activists are starting to realize the magnitude of this mistake. We're paying a lot more attention these days to learning to clearly articulate progressive values, to express ourselves in explicitly moral language, and to put forward more strongly progressive frames, narratives, and future visions to counter the bankrupt conservative worldview that's brought us to this sorry place in history.

But while we're working toward some new understandings here, let's also remember that the right wing's success on taking this field was rooted directly in their ability to mobilize conservative churches to carry the moral banner forward into the culture for them. If we're going to overwrite their brutal and anti-democratic story of how the world works, the most important step we can take is to tap into the vast reach and deep moral authority of our remaining progressive faith communities, and amplify their voices every way we can.
Churches and temples have always been the first and most natural places Americans turn when it's time to have serious cultural conversations about value and meaning and the future they desire. If we're serious about changing the national story and bending the future in our preferred direction, then that's where we need to be.

Sixth: Progressive faiths, across the board, promote the essential belief that human communities are, in themselves, inherently and intrinsically sacred. In fact, progressive atheists may be surprised to learn that among their more religious brothers and sisters, there's very little agreement about the nature of God -- but a very strong consensus that the act of radical community-making is the most intensely holy and essential work that they do.

If there is a God (and progressives of faith debate that question endlessly), then we might most reliably see the face of that divinity in that permanent circle of friends with whom we celebrate life's passages and joys, and wrestle with its hardest challenges -- the people whom we trust to stand with us no matter what comes, and who will work with us tirelessly toward our shared vision of a better world. It's this deep faith in the dream of the beloved community that also feeds our faith in the potential of good government, and our confidence in the unleashed potential of the American people. (And furthermore: I don't think I've ever met a progressive atheist who would disagree on this point.)

Across all the long centuries of the American progressive movement, we've never launched a successful change wave that didn't draw most of its leadership, its base, and its moral grounding from the country's deep liberal religious tradition.

Our churches and temples have been the fountain, the rock, the mother source of our movement from the very beginning. Progressives of faith have always played a central role in our political victories in the past. It's time to stop imagining that somehow, we're going to take the country back without them now.

Sara Robinson, MS, APF is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's Vision newsletter for weekly updates.

AlterNet.org

BELIEF  

AlterNet / By James Rohrer

Are Progressives Harming the Cause by Attacking Organized Religion and People of Faith?

A loyal AlterNet reader raises key questions about the role of faith and religion in the battle for social change.

July 21, 2012  |  

Photo Credit: Jasmic

Editor's Note: ​A short time ago, AlterNet received a very thoughtful letter from one of our readers. Professor James Rohrer wrote that while he was a long-time loyal AlterNet reader, he was concerned about our coverage of faith and religion. His complaint was that AlterNet too frequently portrays religion as the domain of right-wing fundamentalism and carries an overall anti-religious editorial tilt. Rohrer argued this has the effect of alienating millions of our readers who are progressively inclined. He challenged us to consider whether this approach stands in the way of building the unity we need to achieve the broad social change that the vast majority of Americans want.

"One would never know from AlterNet that there are today significant numbers of evangelical Christians who work for peace and justice, such as the Christian Peacemaker Teams who embed themselves as witnesses for peace in the midst of war zones," Rohrer wrote to us. "One would never know that much of the history of socialism in America has been intertwined with religion.  One would never know that many brilliant philosophers, scientists, artists, and scholars in virtually every field of research are also people who have a deep personal faith in some traditional religion."

Rohrer's letter, which echoed concerns we receive from time to time from colleagues and readers, prompted an extensive internal conversation, and we concluded that something has to change. In that spirit, we asked Prof. Rohrer to write an article about his thoughts on the matter, published below. Over the coming weeks we will be relaunching our Belief section, and publishing a wider array of coverage on faith and religion and its role in daily life and politics. (We have already started down this path with Vision editor Sara Robinson's recent article, "Six Reasons We Can't Change the Future Without Progressive Religion.")

***

My brother and I took divergent spiritual paths at an early age. More than half a century ago my brother, now a high-school science teacher and a militant atheist, mortified my mother when he told a sweetly smiling Sunday School teacher that he planned to return the following week “to break every damned window in this place.” My mother was not shocked by his lack of piety—she was a feminist with Unitarian Universalist leanings and had left orthodox Christianity behind years earlier –but by his rudeness. In truth we rarely ever attended church because my mother refused to sanction patriarchal religion and my dad hated to worship alone. But mom was gracious, even to people that she disagreed with in matters of religion and politics.

While my brother over the years has steadfastly scorned all expressions of religious faith as irrational superstition, I have been drawn to a lively spirituality since my earliest recollections. As a child on our Appalachian farm I wandered the hills and forests and prayed to a God that I truly felt as a living presence. I did not acquire my beliefs by having them forced upon me by parents or any organized religion; they grew as naturally and effortlessly as my physical body.

Over the years I have participated in many faith communities, have studied religion professionally, and have taught history and religion at several colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, some of them public and some of them religious institutions. I know that the line between good and evil does not run between religions -- any more than it runs between nations or races (all three are social constructs after all); my colleagues and close friends represent many different faith traditions, and some, like my brother, embrace a wholly secular stance toward life. By choice, however, I identify myself as a Christian. After half a century, I could no more deny my religious convictions than I could deny any other part of my Self.

Lately the progressive blogosphere has been filled with pieces by humanists who apparently take for granted that religious faith is unhealthy for individuals and society, and something that the progressive community needs to combat with the same dedication it fights racial and economic inequality, militarism, and the rabid privatization of everything that even remotely smacks of a public good. Just as “liberal” and “socialist” are code words for “un-American radicals” in the weird world of Fox News, sometimes it seems that “religion” and (especially) “Christian” are code words for “twisted sociopaths” or “patriarchal fascists” in the otherwise generally saner world of progressive journalism. The problem is that in both cases the rhetoric conflicts with something that journalists of any ideological stamp should care a great deal about: truthfulness.

It is simply false that all (or even most) people of sincere faith—including those who are conservative in their religious commitments—are intrinsically irrational, anti-social, patriarchal, racist, or closed to meaningful dialogue. It is equally false that humanists necessarily see the light and embrace progressive politics. In my case, I am a Christian, a scholar, and for more than 30 years now a socialist who supports public healthcare, gender equality, separation of church and state, environmentalism, and pacifism. My humanist brother reads Ayn Rand, watches Fox News and is a dedicated member of the National Rifle Association. He opposes gun control, is a global warming skeptic and supports expanded use of fossil fuels, including fracking (he owns land in an area where you can scarcely hurl a stone without beaning one or two Chesapeake Energy employees). My brother and I do not conform to the stereotypes, and neither do countless other people.

That is, of course, always the case with stereotypes—they ignore flesh-and-blood human beings. We should know better by now than to engage in a politics of social typing, whether it is promulgated by xenophobic racial profilers on the Right or those of the secular Left who delight in demonizing folk who stubbornly choose to believe things that cannot be proven empirically.

Sara Robinson, who is one the most perceptive journalists in the biz today, recently posted a wonderful article on AlterNet that I hope all progressives will read and read over again. Robinson reminded readers that there is a long tradition of progressive religion, and rightly suggested that religious movements do a better job than secularists at building and sustaining authentic communities. If we are going to build a progressive community that has any hope of transforming the United States and the world, we are going to need religion or the equivalent moral force of religion to make it happen.

But we should be careful not to divide religion into artificial and inevitably arbitrary categories like “progressive” Christianity versus “conservative” or “traditional” Christianity, as though one is acceptable and the other beyond redemption. People are almost unimaginably creative, both individually and collectively, and they always defy easy categorization. The political behavior of religious traditionalists—Christian or otherwise—historically has been a moving target. We should not assume that theological conservatives think alike on every issue, or that they will inevitably vote as a block, or that they cannot be persuaded to join in support of progressive policies that affect the well-being of everybody’s children. There are today folk who identify as evangelicals -- even theological fundamentalists -- who work for racial equality, oppose U.S. military policy and hold economic views that might consistently be termed socialist. Sadly, one would never know this from reading recent progressive journalism.

The consequences of our myopia about American religion could be catastrophic, especially as we face an upcoming national election in which a swing of even a few votes could conceivably have a major impact upon the path our nation takes during the next critical years. For decades we have watched as Karl Rove and his cronies on the Right have repeatedly used volatile wedge issues to win the support of millions of religious conservatives who might otherwise have voted against their brand of radical individualism and greed. Contrary to what some talking heads of the Left and Right imagine, there is nothing in either the Bible or the Christian tradition that automatically pulls theological conservatives into alignment with antisocial political agendas.

Don’t believe me? Let me cite just one of many possible examples that underscore the malleability of conservative Christianity. Alton is a village in Sioux County, Iowa, which is statistically one of the most reliably Republican counties in the United States. It is a stronghold of evangelical Christianity, the sort of place where neighbors might scowl at you if you mow your lawn on the Sabbath. Every four years Republican presidential candidates swarm Sioux County during primary season the way bees hover over clover fields. Despite his Catholicism, Rick Santorum signs sprouted like dandelions across Sioux County this past year, as the overwhelmingly Protestant electorate set aside their theological views for the sake of political expediency. This is “red state America,” proudly dyed red, white and blue.

Most Sioux County voters are descendants of Dutch Protestant immigrants who settled the area more than a century ago. Their grandparents and great-grandparents were if anything even more theologically conservative, more pietistic, and more inclined to lace every conversation with biblical injunctions. But a century ago, the local folk opened their Bibles and found admonitions against rich rulers exploiting the poor. They found Jesus preaching that the "sinners” would enter the Kingdom of God before the Chamber of Commerce types, and understood that disciples must speak out against the Trusts and war profiteers. I just spent a week reading through the Alton Democrat for 1900, which routinely drew upon the Bible to editorialize against the imperialist ambitions of the United States --even dubbing its capitalist rulers “immoral” and “evil”-- and to denounce the moneyed aristocracy that unjustly controlled the destiny of the people.

The folk who now constitute the strongest base for the Republican Party have forgotten that they are descended from the Populists who once thundered their scripture-laced jeremiads against the railroads and the banks and who demanded radical democracy in the name of both God and the people. William Jennings Bryan, the “silver tongued orator of the Platte,” three times tapped into that moral fervor to make runs for the White House. Bryan, of course, hated the Trusts, hated militarism and waged holy war against the Gold Standard. (“You shall not crucify mankind upon this cross of gold.:) He was also a devout Presbyterian Sunday School teacher and fundamentalist who died shortly after leading the charge against evolution in the infamous “Monkey Trial.”

The Bible has not changed, and neither have the core theological beliefs of the people of Sioux County. But society has changed and the nature of political action has evolved almost beyond recognition since the turn of the 20th century. The Bible and the Christian tradition can be tapped as resources for an array of political agendas. That the “heartland” has in recent decades swung so far away from the populist tradition of Bryan is not because there is something intrinsically authoritarian or anti-democratic in the religious beliefs of the masses, but because Republican strategists in the last two generations have done a far better job than progressives at organizing, marketing and communicating their message in a way that appeals at a visceral level to the hopes and fears of many people. To change America, we must change this reality.

Although some progressive bloggers apparently think that organized Christianity is on the way to extinction, there is every reason to believe that religion is going to remain an important component of culture for as long as humanity survives. There is no conceivable progressive future—for America or the globe –that does not embrace people of diverse religious faiths. Within the American context any possible future will almost certainly include a Christian majority for many years to come. Militant secularists who care about building a better world for everybody need to accept this truth and start to learn how to communicate and build relationships more effectively with people of faith, including the evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics they most frequently tilt against.

Posting blogs on progressive sites that engage in simplistic stereotypes or that employ derogatory language is a bad start. In a college course on American democracy I routinely send students to AlterNet in the hope that they will open themselves to new ways of thinking about racial politics, inequality and the public good. Sadly, the religion posts too often serve as static, distracting them from the urgent issues that I want them to engage.

Most of my students are hardworking middle-class folk from rural communities, who grew up in places where life revolves around family, the church and the local school. For the most part they are sincerely idealistic and intelligent people who recognize quickly when they have been insulted or patronized. It is difficult for them to hear and trust progressive analysis of healthcare, civil rights, militarism, and economics when it comes packaged with attacks upon their most deeply held spiritual convictions. Insulting intelligent voters is simply bad politics, whether it is done by dogmatists of the Right or the Left.

James Rohrer is a professor of history at University of Nebraska-Kearney.

Ban Penn State Football!

Penn State: Full Coverage

Buzz Bissinger: Ban Penn State Football!

by Buzz Bissinger Jul 13, 2012 8:52 AM EDT

And tear down that statue of Joe Paterno too. Buzz Bissinger on why yesterday’s report that the university ignored Jerry Sandusky’s crimes made him so sick—and his ideas for restitution.

I was in a foul and unforgiveable mood yesterday. I was late getting out of the house, cursing the vapors in an unhinged spew, forgetting to take the medication that keeps me tethered. I have been doing a radio gig for a while on WPHT-AM in Philadelphia; during a break I went off on my partner without rational reason or right, viciously attacking him verbally, wild-eyed in anger.

Part of it was lack of sleep. Part of it was the anxiety and stress that I can no longer control without those pharmaceutical props. But part of it was the detailed report by former FBI Director Louis Freeh on how the monster of former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was not only allowed to exist but to bloom at Penn State University. On at least two occasions, 1998 and 2001, there were clear indications that Sandusky was sexually abusing kids. Nothing was done and Sandusky went on to rape other kids. But he still got his lump sum pension payment of $168,000, unprecedented in school history, according to the Freeh report. He still got emeritus status, although I naively thought that such status was reserved for professors, not a man in the trivial pursuit of coaching linebackers. He still got keys to all the buildings. He still made nearly 60 trips at university expense even after retiring in 1999. He still got special VIP season tickets. A week before his arrest, even though he knew he was under investigation by a grand jury, he still used them. The only thing missing was a special plaque commemorating Sandusky’s fine years of service to the school as a sexual animal.

Like many of you, I have lived with this horror ever the since the report of a state grand jury in Pennsylvania was made public in November of 2011, detailing act after act of buttf--king by Sandusky on defenseless children, much of it taking place in the Lasch building on the Penn State campus, in spitting distance to where the eternally damned Joe Paterno had his office.

From my own experience writing about the insidious culture of sports in America for nearly 25 years, I knew instantly that the culture of football at Penn State lay at the horror of what happened. I knew that powerful men at the university, Paterno in particular, drunk with the ego and false immortality that big-time college football coaches incomprehensibly have in this country, were covering up. I knew that Paterno and other top officials at the school, given the choice between feeling any scent of emotion for young children who had allegedly been molested by Sandusky or worrying about Jerry Sandusky’s welfare because he was a member of the Happy Valley football family and an integral part of Penn State football in its heyday in the late 1990s, had picked Sandusky in a second.

I knew Paterno and his acolytes, because he ran the school, would stretch and strain and lie to themselves and obfuscate to make their buddy boy Jerry the victim, a man at most with a sickness who needed help. I knew they had given good ol’ Jerry every benefit of the doubt as a way of covering up for his obvious predatory behavior despite the obvious warning signs, which was also a way of covering up for the football program at Penn State and keeping the football culture at the forefront of the university, the core of the bicycle wheel from which every other spoke extended. I knew this had happened because Joe Paterno, not a good man but a bad one far more adept than he ever was coaching at creating his false narrative of being above the sinkhole of college football, wanted it to happen this way.

Students and those in the community visit the Joe Paterno statue after football head coach Joe Paterno was fired during the Penn State Board of Trustees Press Conference, at Beaver Field, November 9, 2011 in State College, Pennsylvania. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)

College football, as admittedly exciting as it is, serves no academic purpose and in the end, can destroy a school’s reputation.

When Louis Freeh held a press conference yesterday and stated point blank, after interviewing nearly 400 individuals and spending $6.5 million, that “four of the most powerful people at the Pennsylvania State University—President Graham Spanier, Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary C. Schultz, Athletic Director Timothy M. Curley, and Head Football Coach Joseph V. Paterno—failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade,” I felt like I imagine many of you felt who were outraged from the beginning: no vindication.

To the contrary, I felt overwhelming sadness and agitation that the Freeh report is the end of the Penn State investigation into the football culture that permeated every pore of the university, the board of trustees sighing with palpable relief that the self-flagellation they allowed the university to take by commissioning the report was enough.

I felt sick to my stomach as I watched the board of trustees’ press conference after the release of the Freeh report, or at least watched as much as I could. They cared more about their carefully coiffed look than they did about actually doing anything proactive. Their carefully scripted words, examined beforehand no doubt by a phalanx of spinmeisters, were barely above a monotone.

When I heard the words “accountability” and “responsibility,” the words entitled people use to act as if they will do something when they won’t, I sank, once again like many of you, into a funk of deflation and disappointment. Writing about Penn State football has never been about me. It has been about the fact that college football, as admittedly exciting as it is, serves no academic purpose and in the end, can destroy a school’s reputation.

The board should have announced yesterday that the upcoming season of football at Penn State will be cancelled. It would have been a sincere and needed message to the world that the football culture will no longer be sustained. For the innocent players caught up in this monstrosity, the answer is easy—release them from their scholarship commitments to Penn State and let them go elsewhere without the normal period of having to sit out a year. That way they would not be punished for the sins of others.

But the board did nothing except blather in empty ring-around-the-rosy rhetoric. They should have said at a minimum that the statue of Joe Paterno, now a symbol of a man without moral standard, a man with the iron-clad agenda of protecting his football game at all costs, even if a sexual animal satisfied his cravings right under his nose, should be removed.

But they didn’t do any of those things, actions that are not only appropriate but also urgently immediate. The scathing report by Louis Freeh should be a beginning, not an end, but the board believes it is an end: we have allowed ourselves to be beaten bloody, our version of Fifty Shades of Grey, and what is more important in America today than a dramatic mea culpa. It is all part of the narrative, corporate damage control 101. The board is meeting today and perhaps a miracle will happen. If the board does the right thing, it should be commended.

It’s also in the hands of the National Collegiate Athletic Association now. They have said they are doing an investigation, so maybe there is something positive in that. If Southern Methodist University got the so-called death penalty from the NCAA for a widespread scheme of paying off recruits, banned from football for a year and only allowed to return in a severely reduced capacity, then Penn State should get a minimum five-year ban. Draconian? Yes. Brutal? Yes. But punishment is brutal and supposed to act as a deterrent to other schools who have not been involved in something as heinous as what Penn State officials did.

But the track record of the NCAA is atrocious. As Taylor Branch of pointed out in his brilliant piece for The Atlantic, the NCAA is a cartel that is there to protect the interests of the member schools that support it, not there as a body to enforce the excesses of sports in America and keep them clean and in perspective. The NCAA is about money, billions of it raised through tournaments and bowl games; Penn State has the second-highest profits of any football team in the country next to the University of Texas, about $50 million dollars. Excuse my English, but does the NCAA want to f--k with that? Does the school want to f--k with that?

So the report by Louis Freeh yesterday does what scathing reports always do—creates a blip of excitement where so-called experts, including myself, go on national television and give their invigorated two cents. There is actually meaning in those appearances, because they do keep the pressure on Penn State. The hue and cry for the banning of football has never been stronger. It is a good thing.

But America lives in blips of attention—focusing for a week here and a week there before moving onto something else. It is the 24-hour news cycle, a hysterical avalanche of stories before it’s time again to feed the insatiable beast.

I personally can’t imagine the Penn State football team taking the field this season. I can’t imagine the players running out of the tunnel pumped up like psychopathic creatures, slapping each other on the helmet, the ritualistic bounce of shoulder pad against shoulder pad.

But they will, because this is America and this is football. We are the only society in the world that looks to universities and colleges for primary sources of sports entertainment. I pray that I am wrong, but I am convinced that the Nittany Lions will take that field. There will no doubt be a moment of prayer before the game for the Sandusky victims, as if that means anything, lessens what happened to them. Then it will be time for the home opener. The 110,000 strong of Beaver Stadium, who like their university haven’t learned anything, will roar and bellow and get drunk. And the Freeh report will fade into the midst, like most reports do.

Speed Read

• Freeh Report's 7 Most Damaging Findings

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Buzz Bissinger, a sports columnist for The Daily Beast, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Tags:

• football,
• Jerry Sandusky,
• Penn State University,
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The Thinking Person's Ass or Occam's Donkey

Occam's Donkey - thinking critically

Critical Thinking and Evidence Supported Practice: Are we there yet?

About Occam's Donkey

Combine Occam's razor, Buridan's ass and Shrek's Donkey - and you have Occam's Donkey, the thinking person's ass!

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Mind myths: The 10% myth

This is the first of a series of posts on mind myths. Mind myths typically arise as a result of hucksters' attempts to use the allure of neuroscience to sell New Age type self-improvement products. I would place such mind myths in one of four categories:

Representing the originator's fantasy and bearing no resemblance to any neuroscience findings. The 10% myth would be one of these.

Misinterpretation or misrepresentation of actual neuroscience findings. The whole-brain craze comes to mind.

The inappropriate or premature application of actual neuroscience findings, for example attempts to implement neuroscience findings before they have been well replicated.

Using neuroscience explanations redundantly for well-known cognitive processes in order to sound more scientific. Much of so-called brain based education and brain based management would fall into this category.

I'm starting the series with the most common of the myths, the claim that we only use 10% of our brain. Hucksters commonly claim that their products can activate the other 90% and that we all could then become Einsteins! Barry Beyerstein indicated that the myth was already common early in the 20th century. This myth is typically encountered as “… scientists say we use only 10% of our brains”. Who these "scientists" are and how they determined this fact is never indicated.

Beyerstein and others exposed the myth on a number of grounds:

The brain comprises 2% of body weight, but accounts for 20% of the body’s oxygen consumption. There would no evolutionary advantage in maintaining such an extravagant organ that is only 10% functional.

If we used only 10% of our brain, damage to large areas of the brain should have no effect. There is, however, virtually no area of the brain that does not result in some deficit when it is damaged.

The principle of "use it or lose it" also applies to the brain. If we used only 10%, the remaining 90% would deteriorate permanently. That has never been found in histological examinations of normal brains at autopsy.

Modern brain imaging research has completely refuted the idea that large areas of the brain are inactive most of the time.

What we and our brains could have looked like if we used only 10% of it! (Image from Internet, origin unknown)

The 10% myth, however, is good for business and the myth-makers are not about to let it go. Under the premise that if 10% is good for business, less will be even better; there has been claims that we may use as little as half a percent (0,5%) of our brain! This claim, incidentally, was in a magazine called Insight and was by who else but a Brain Gym practitioner!

See more on this myth in or at:

Beyerstein, B.L. 1999. Whence cometh the myth that we use only 10% of our brains? In S. Della Sala (Ed.), Mind myths: Exploring popular assumptions about the mind and brain. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

See Beyerstein online at Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains?

Jeremy Dean's PsyBlog:
Seriously, Would You Admit to Only Using 10% of Your Brain?

Also see Eric Chudler's excellect Neuroscience for Kids: Do we use only 10% of our brains?

The Myth of Occam's Razor

WIKISOURCE

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Myth of Occam's Razor  (1918)  by William M. Thorburn

Published in Mind 27 (107): 345–353.; (scan index)

1. From the middle of the Nineteenth Century, nearly every modern book on Logic has contained the words: Entia non sunt multiplicanda, præter necessitatem: quoted as if they were the words of William of Ockham. But nobody gives a particular reference to any work of the Singular and Invincible Doctor: sometimes also, as on the title-page of his De Sacramento Altaris (1513), described as the Venerabilis Inceptor (of "Terminism" ?). We turn in vain even to Sir William Hamilton, facile princeps (among English writers) in philosophical learning; or to his nearest rival, his disciple Dean Mansel. And my own fruitless inquisition for the formula, in those works of Ockham which have been printed, has led me to disbelieve that he ever used it to express his Critique of Entities.

2. This disbelief is further justified by what I find, and cannot find, in laborious recent histories of Medieval philosophy. Haureau (in his Philosophie Scholastique, vol. ii, chap. xxviii., pp. 438, 443, 446): Erdmann (in his History of Philosophy, vol. i., §216); and De Wulf (in his Medieval Philosophy, §368); all concur in giving another set of words, as those usually employed by Ockham: "Pluralitas non est ponenda (or Non est ponenda pluralitas) sine necessitate". They do not even mention the common form of the Novaculum Nominalium. Nor does Prantl, in his large collection of citations (Geschichte der Logik, iii., pp. 327-420); though one of them (Note 758) contains: "Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate". Nor does Stockl, in his very full Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, §§259-266, pp. 986-1021 in the second volume. He selects: "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora": as distinctive of Ockham in this connexion. So did the earlier historian Tenneman: Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 851 in band viii. (1810). In England this phrase even became a legal maxim: as we may see in Wingate's Maxims of Reason (1658), no. 177. And it was judicially applied by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere^[1] in 1610 and 1612. But it seems likely that Ockham's most famous phrase in his own day was the: "Sufficiunt singularia, et ita tales res universalia omnino frustra ponitur": from which he probably became known as the Singular Doctor. It must not, however, be supposed that Albertus Magnus was called the Universal Doctor, for a similar though opposite reason. He, like Aristotle and Francis Bacon, "took all knowledge to be his province".

3. Ueberweg indeed, whose History of Philosophy was first published in 1863 (ten years after the revised edition of Hamilton's Discussions in 1853), said in §16 of his second volume (§104 of the English translation by Morris and Porter): "William of Occam founds his rejection of Realism on the principle; Entia non sunt multplicanda præter necessitatem. He combats the realising and hypostatising of abstractions (Sufficiunt Singularia, etc.)": p. 462 in the first volume of the English translation by Morris (1872), and §36 page 307 of theil ii., in the new German edition of 1898. No reference is given; and Ueberweg cannot always be trusted, even when he does give a reference. On the previous page (461) of §104, he refers to the Scotis Petrus Aureolus (†1322, Archbishop of Aix): In SS., ii., D. 12, Q. 1, for an assertion that: "He (P.A.) enounced the principle subequently known as the Law of Parcimony: Non est Philosophicum, pluralitatem rerum ponere sine causa; frustra enim fit per plura, quod fieri potest per pauciora". But there are no such clauses in the locus indicated; and the Index gives no clue to their presence anywhere else. It is indeed possible that he has written them somewhere; because the words had previously been used by his master Duns Scotus: a fact, with which Ueberweg does not seem to have been acquainted. Aureolus actually says (In SS., i., D. 3, on p. 164 of vol. i.), referring to Aristotle's Physica (i.): "In principiis debet tanta paucitas, quanta sufficit ad salvandum ea, quæ sunt in natura necessaria".

4. My note of April, 1915, asking for references to Ockham from readers of Mind, had the same fate as Prof. W. R. Sorley's inquiry in July, 1904 (p. 456), for the source of T.H. Green's fictitious quotation from Kant^[2] (so long beloved of Oxford examiners): "Macht zwar der Verstand die Natur, aber er schafft sie nicht". There was no response; and, I venture to think, for the same reason. The earliest use of the popular phrase, which I had then lighted upon, occurs in an Inaugural Dissertation by Leibnitz in 1670: De Stylo Philosophico Marii Nizolii, §28 (De Secta Nominalium). He does not, however, profess to quote, but says in oratio obliqua: "Generalis autem Regula est, quo Nominales passim untuntur, Entia non esse multiplicanda præter necessitatem". The words do not appear in the only philosophical work of Mario Nizzoli: De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi: published at Parma in 1553. Another editition was published at Frankfurt in 1674, under the new title Anti-barbarus Philosophicus; with the dissertation by Leibnitz prefixed as in Introduction. In Hurter's Nomenclator (iii., 8), Nizolius is described as: "Philosophiæ scholasticæ acer adversarius, Occami Nominalismi assecla". But he is better known through the many editions of his Ciceronian Concordance (Thesaurus Ciceronis).

5. I have since found in Clauberg's Elementa Philosophiæ seu Ontosophia (Groningen, 1647), part ii., §169, p. 74: "Entia non sunt temere (sine necessitate) multiplicanda". And again on page 174 (part iii., §121): in both cases without quotation-marks, or any reference to Nominalism, to Ockham, or to any source whatever. Possibly he regarded the phrase as a proverb, needing no sponsor. But I cannot find any such proverb in those vast collections of mediæval and earlier phrases: the Adagia of Erasmus, and the Polyanthes of Mirabellius. The common formula is exactly given in Clauberg's Logica Vetus et Nova (1654), page 320, under Definition; but not as a quotation, nor with any reference.

6. De Wulf in §335 accuses Duns Scotus of: "creating fictitious, misleading, and superfluous beaconlights, - in defiance of a precept which he himself pretended to approve of: entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem". But he gives no reference, and I cannot find the formula anywhere in the text of the Subtle Doctor's writings. It appears substantially indeed in Wadding's edition (1639), tom. vii., p. 723 (27): but only in a new Franciscan Commentary on the Opus Oxon., iii., D. 34, Q. 1, Scholium 4. Wadding's chief collaborator, John Ponce of Cork, there mentions "illud axioma vulgare, quo tam frequenter utuntur Scholastici; non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate". He does not, however, name any of these Scholastici; and I can merely affirm (with almost mathematical certainty) that they do not include Ockham, Scotus, or Aquinas; and the axiom does not occur in the two most popular textbooks of the Middle Ages, the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Bishop of Paris, †1164), and the Summulæ Logicales of Petrus Hispanus (†1277, as Pope John XXI.). I may add, with sufficient moral certainty, Abelard, Hales, Albert, Bonaventura, and Durand. Ockham's disciples, Gabriel Biel of Tuebingen (†1495), and John Major of Haddington and St. Andrews (†1540), each of whom has been called, "The Last of the Schoolmen," are satisfied with their Master's Pluralitas or Frustra fit.^[3] Reference may be made for the German, to his In Sententias, iii., D. 3, Q. 2, N. 4 (Conclusio 1), or (for applications) to i., D. 26, Q. 1, A. 1 (Conclusio 3). And for the Scot, to his Logica (1516), Tractatus Primus Summularum, folio 28, col. 4.

7. On the other hand, De Wulf might have said with perfect accuracy, that Scotus, no less than Ockham, accepts and systematically applies the Law of Parcimony; whose origin he ascribes to Aristotle's Physica and De Anima, especially the first Book of the former (cc. 5 and 7). Two (if not more) equivalent phrases are common to Ockham and Scotus: Pluralitas, etc., and Frustra fit, etc.

(a) "Nunquam est ponenda pluralitas sine necessitate," appears in the Scotian Commentary In Metaphysica (Aristotelis): i., Q. 4, Scholium 3, p. 532 (10) of Wadding's tom. iv.

(b) "Pluralitas non est ponenda, nisi ubi est necessitas": Opus Oxon., i., D. 3, Q. 6, Scholium 5, p. 525 (12) of tom. v.

(c) "Ista opinio ponit pluralitatem sine necessitate, quod est contra doctrinam Philosophorum": Opus Oxon., iv., D.1, QQ. 4 and 5, Scholium 3, p. 84 (7) of tom. viii.

(d) And in the next Scholium (4) he declares: "Sicut sequenti rationem naturalem, non sunt ponenda plura, nisi quae ratio naturalis concludit, ita sequenti fidem non sunt ponenda plura quam veritas fidei requirat": p. 90 (9) of tom. viii.

(e) A peculiar variant occurs on page 737 (4) of tom. iv.: In Metaphysica, viii., Q. 1, Scholium 2: "Positio plurium semper debet dicere necessitatem manifestam".

(f) "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora:" is found on page 30 (3) of tom. ii.: In Physica (Aristotelis), i., Q. 8.

(g) This is expanded into: "Generale enim principium est, quod si aliquid potest aeque bene fieri per pauciora, sicut per plura, nullo modo talis pluralitas debet poni": De Rerum Principio, Q. 1, art. 2, Scholium on page 92 (9) of tom. iii.

(h) Another peculiar Scotian variant is given in the Reportata Parisiensia, ii., D. 15, Q. 1, Scholium 5, on page 348 of tom. xi.: "Paucitas est ponenda, ubi pluralitas non est necessaria".

8. The Metaphysical (or Methodological) Law of Parcimony (or Logical Frugality), indicated but not very distinctly expressed by Aristotle,^[4] was fully and finally established, not by Ockham (†1347), but by his teacher Duns Scotus (†1308): the greatest mind of the later Middle Ages, so unhappily cut off when he was only beginning to pass from the critical to the constructive stage. According to some biographers he died at thirty-four. Though unintelligently described by Leibnitz and others as an Extreme Realist, his Universal was only an Ens Rationis; a Brain-tool having a merely metaphorical entity. "Ens (Reale seu Naturale) est concretum," he said in his Tractatus de Modis Significandis, i., c. 25 (12): page 58b in tom. i. "Ens est duplex, naturae et rationis ... Ens Rationis ... cujusmodi sunt Genus, Species, Definitio:" in his [[In Elenchorum LL. , Q. 1, page 224 (2) in tom. i. "Est enim Species tenuis similitudo Singularium": in his Super Universalia Porphyrii, Q. 4, page 90 (4) in tom. i. The "Formalism" of the Most Subtle Doctor looks like the tentative and temporary device of a public teacher in Holy Orders; who did not wish to break openly with the dominant tradition of Realism; but was feeling his way to the "Terminism" boldly professed by his independent contemporary Bishop Durand of Meaux (†1332), and afterwards completely worked out by his pupil William of Ockham. It has lately been stigmatized by the modern semi-Scotist Professor Pohle of Breslau, as: "an inconceivable hybrid, which excludes every attempt of the mind to grasp it": p. 153 of The Essence and Attributes of God: vol. i. of his Dogmatic Theology, translated by Arthur Preuss. Both the Oxford Fransciscans (Ockham and Scotus) used indifferently the two formulas: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate": and, "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora"; while a former very similar to the latter was used by the Most Resolute Doctor, the great Dominican Nominalist Durand; "Frustra ponuntur plura, ubi unum sufficit": In Sententias, ii., D. 3, Q. 5, N. 4. Occam's main contribution to the Doctrine was a special application to the Logic of Universals, in his characteristic formula: "Sufficiunt Singularia, et ita tales res universales omnino frustra ponuntur": In SS., i., D. 2, Q. 4 (top of col. 18). Few or no competent critics will question Mansel's judgment of Ockham, on page 40 of his Introduction to the Rudimenta of Aldrich: "The ablest writer on Logic whom the Schools have produced.... The Summa Totius Logicæ of Occam is the most valuable contribution of the Middle Ages to the Logica Docens. His editor, Mark of Beneventum, said that, if the Gods used Logic, it would be the Logic of Ockham."

9. The doctrine was first completely applied to Physics by Sir Isaac Newton in 1713. He quotes the very words of Scotus and Ockham in the brief annotation of his first Regula Philosophandi: ^[5] which is itself a very similar statement of the principle. In the Third Edition (1726) of the Principia Mathematica (De Mundi Systemate, lib. iii., p. 387, the Rule runs: "Causas rerum naturalium non plures admitti debere, quam quae et verae sint et earum phenomenis explicandis sufficient". Newton then subjoins: "Dicunt utique philosophi: Natura nihil agit frustra, et frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora": a comment not found in the First Edition (1687). There is, however, no mention of Ockham or Nominalism in the Principia. The term Novaculum Nominalium was quite unknown in the seventeenth century, as the international learned translation of Condillac's Gallic wit: Rasoir des Nominaux, in a note on page 214 of his Origine des Connasissances Humaines (1746): Section V. (Des Abstractions), chap. i., §5. The English variant (Occam's Razor) is a century younger; having made its first appearance in Sir William Hamilton's Discussions (1852), page 590 (On Causality). In the second edition (1853) it is used on pages 616 and 629. In the latter place it is for the first time distinctly associated with the current form.

10. The following Conclusions I call Provisional, mainly because there is still a possibility that they may be upset by German investigators of Ockham's unpublished manuscripts. These have lain idle for nearly six centuries at Ingolstadt or Munich; still uncopied, and probably unread, by any Englishman; much to the discredit of Merton College and the University of Oxford. Many of his cardinal works have never been printed: including his Commentaries on the Second, Third, and Fourth Books of the Lombard Sentences. The Commentary on the First Book (printed in 1495) is very full; but the appended comments on the other Books are only slender bundles of selected Questions, occupying together only one-third of the volume.

Provisional Conclusions  A. "Occam's Razor" is a modern myth. There is nothing mediaeval in it, except the general sense of the post-mediaeval formula: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. This myth has come to full maturity and secured general assent, within the lifetime of many philosophers of the present day; though it is a matter of purely intellectual interest, without any impulse or reinforcement from commercial greed, family-pride, national vanity, sectarian zeal, or political party-spirit.

B. The age of the English title is not yet three-score years and ten: dating from the publication of Sir William Hamilton's Discussions (1852).

C. The Latin title, Novaculum Nominalium, is little (if at all) more than a century older: being a translation of the French title, Rasoir des Nominaux, bestowed upon the current formula by Condillac in 1746.

D. (1) The current formula was unknown to Ockham and the other Schoolmen.

(2) It was invented in 1639, substantially in its present wording, by the Scotist Commentator, John Ponce of Cork: a little-known man of great abilities and very independent disposition.

 

(3) It first appeared in its present exact order of words, in the Logica Vetus et Nova of John Clauberg of Groningen in 1654.

 

(4) It was first formally associated with Nominalism by Leibnitz in 1670; and this connexion seems to have been generally accepted from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The reason of the connexion was indicated in 1676, by Jakob Thomasius (father of the celebrated jurisprudent Christian T.), in his Oration De Doctoribus Scholasticus Latinis to the University of Leipzig: "Hoc principium: Non esse absque necessitate multiplicanda entia. Hinc enim ipsi (Nominales) Realibus ut prodigis rerum multiplicioribus invidiam fecerunt, suam vero philosophiam frugalitatis nomine extulerunt. Reales vicissim qui principium illud, mirum entium avaritiam quam tamen natura non amet, in Scholas importasse, simulque; multas interemisse veritates dictitarent, Nominalibus avaritiam probi loco objecerunt." It is possible that Leibnitz, who was only twenty-four in 1670, may have got the notion of connecting Parcimony (or Logical Frugality) with Nominalism, from some earlier expression of opinion by the elder Thomasius.^[6] Some of the very words of Thomasius appear in Morhof's Polyhistor (1688), Tom. II. (1), c. 13, p. 75: which is followed in Brucker's History of Philosophy (1766), Tom. III., p. 904, §27.

(5) Still, even then, nobody connected Ockham in particular, with the newly-accepted Scotist-Nominal formula. That connexion may be dated apparently from 1812; when Tennemann in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (§271), wrote of Ockham as following the Rule: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: without expressly ascribing to him the actual use of the very words. They had not been mentioned in his previous larger History (1810), which had quoted "Frustra fit" in a note on page 851 of band viii. Tennemann's loose anachronistic use of the post-mediaeval formula seems to have misled Ueberweg; and had previously caused misunderstanding in Britain. His

Manual had been translated in 1832 by Rev. Arthur Johnson, from the posthumous edition of 1829 as revised by Wendt. Hamilton never noticed the anachronism, though he reviewed Johnson's translation very severely in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1832. He indeed tacitly adopted it in 1853, after inventing the label Occam's Razor. That label was at first (in 1852) applied by him to the Law of Parcimony in general. Hamilton, moreover, seems to have previously devised that very title, Parcimony, in place of the older Frugality. So far as I can find, it first appeared in his edition of Reid's Works (1846), in a note to Reid's First Essay on the Intellectual Powers (chap. iii., p. 236), and in his Supplementary Note A, §2, p. 751. 

 

The unfortunate carelessness of Tennemann and Hamilton has engendered a very serious philosophic corruption. For, it has turned a sound rule of Methodology into a Metaphysical dogma. As J.S. Mill pointed out in his Examination of Hamilton (ch. 24, p. 542 in 4th edition): "The Law of Parcimony ... is a purely logical precept". It is folly, to complicate research by multiplying the objects of inquiry; but we know too little of the ultimate constitution of the Universe, to assume that it cannot be far more complex than it seems, or than we have any actual reason to suppose. The value of this warning has just now received signal illustration from the very recent discovery of Chemical Isotopes; which has proved (e.g.), that what had previously been simply called "lead" is infinitely complex in its composition.^[7] This discovery ought to operate as a salutary check upon dogmatism, and the tendency to turn logical rules into ontological principles.

Appendix Some readers of Mind, and other students of Philosophy, to whom the rare works of Ockham are not readily accessible, may be glad to have the following list of seventeen relevant quotations at hand for ready reference: -
A. "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate." (1) In Sententias (Petri Lombardi), lib. i., Distinctio i., QQ. 1 and 2. (2) In SS., i., D. 7, Q. 2. (3) Quodlibeta, i., Q. 3. (4) Do., iii., Q. 2. (5) Do., iv., Q. 15. (6) Do., v., Q. 5 (lines 3 and 4).

B. "Non est ponenda pluralitas sine necessitate." In SS., ii., Q. 15 (second column): Utrum Angelus superior intelligat per pauciores species quam inferior?
C. "Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate." In SS., i., D. 27, Q. 2 (section K, not J as given by Prantl in his Note 758). The matter discussed is Species Intelligibilis.
D. "Talis species (intelligibus) non est ponenda propter superfluitatem." Expositio Aurea: Perierm., Proem. See Prantl, N. 757.
E. "Si duae res sufficiunt ad ejus veritatem, superfluum est ponere aliam (tertiam) rem": (1) Quodlibeta, iv., Q. 19; (Prantl, N. 768). (2) Do., iv., Q. 24; (Haureau, ii., 459).
F. "Sufficiunt singularia, et ita tales res universales omnino frustra ponuntur." In SS., i., D. 2, Q. 4 (top of column 18).
G. "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora."

(1) Summa Tot. Log., Pars. i., cap. 12, f. 6, r. A.: referring to Intentio prima and secunda.

(2) In SS., i., D. 31, Q. 1 (middle of first column): Utrum Identitas, Similitudo, et Equalitas in divinis sint relationes reales?

(3) In SS., ii., Q. 15, sections O and Q: referring to Species Intelligibilis.

(4) Philosophia Naturalis (Summulæ in Physicorum LL.), Quarta Pars, cap. 1, p. 86b of the Roman edition (1637). In this he denies the reality of an Instant of Time; showing some anticipation of the (New Herakleitean) doctrines associated with the names of Bergson and William James. See also page 85a (at the top). Ockham's doctrine of the Continuum (in regard to Space), as it appears in his Quodlibete, I., Q. 9: Utrum linea componatur ex punctis: has been set out and discussed by Mr. Delisle Burns in Mind of October, 1916 (pp. 506 ff.)

(5) De Sacramento Altaris, Q. 3 (Utrum corpus quod est quantitas set res absoluta, distincta realiter a substantia), page 41 of the Paris (Blackletter) edition of 1513. I am indebted for this last reference to Mr. C. Delisle Burns, in Mind, October, 1915. Mr. Burns has shown the philosophical incongruity, and consequent improbability of the commonly assumed use of "Entia, etc.," by Ockham. See also page 45. And compare with Scotus on the same subject (Quantity): In Physica, i., Q. 8: tom. ii., p. 30 (3). Refer to §7 (f.) supra. Aristotle's nearest approximations to the doctrine developed by Scotus will be found in cc. 4, 6, and 7 of the First Book of the Physica. "Beltion de elattō kai peperasmena labein, hoper poiei Empedokles: (Praestat autem pauciora et finita principia sumere: quod quidem Empedocles)": cap. 4, p. 188a, lines 17-18 (Bekker). See also c.6; p. 189a, lines 12-13, 20, 26-27; and p. 189b, lines 18-19. Likewise c. 7; p. 190b, lines 35-36; and p. 191a, lines 6-7.

W. M. Thorburn. 

 

 

 

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1. ↑ Coke's Reports: I., 8, 167 (Earl of Cumberland's case): and I., 9 (Sir G. Reynal's case). See also Coke's Institutes, Part I. (on Littleton) for the application of this maxim to feudal tenure.
2. ↑ "The Understanding makes Nature, but does not create" (the material out of which it is made). See T.H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, §11, first published in Mind of January, 1882, p.9. It occurs also in his Lectures on Kant: Works, vol. ii., p.86 (§74).
3. ↑ Further, we may note, there is no mention of the common formula (or any other) in the Philosophia Nominalium Vindicata of Jean Salabert, published at Paris so late as 1651.
4. ↑ See end of Appendix.
5. ↑ Regula I. (in the Third and last of the author's editions), corresponds with Hypoth. I. on p. 402 of the First Edition (1687). The change of name from Hypothesis to Regula, and the words "Dicunt etc.," prefixed to the original comment: "Natura enim simplex est et rerum causis superfluis non luxuriat": first appeared on p. 357 of the Second Edition (1713). In the First, the paging leaps from 383 to 400: 386 thus becoming 402.
6. ↑ Thomasius says obscurely of "Entia non etc." (loc. cit.): "Quod a Ferrariensibus discimus, frequentissime Nominalea usurpasse". But I cannot find any mention of collaborate Ferrarienses (like the Salmanticenses and Conimbricenses) in any work of reference. Brucker (Hist. Phil., III., 866) classifies Hieronymus Fantonus (or Fontanus) de Ferrariis O.P. (+1532) as a Nominalis, but this Grand Inquisitor's Repertorium Scoti (or Loci Communes) contains no allusion to the Law of Parcimony in any form. Franciscus Sylvester Ferrariensis O.P. (+1526) cites 'Frustra fit etc.' (in substance), and ascribes its origin to Aristotle, in his Questions on the Physica: I., Q. 9, p. 35b. He says there: "Quod potest fieri per pauciora, superfluum est, si fiat por plura": and (a few lines lower), "Natura non agit per plura, quod fieri per pauciora potest". The latter seems to be borrowed from Averroes: Comment. de Physico Auditu (Aristotelis). N. 50, on p. 31b of the Latin translation by Jacob Mantinus (Venice, 1574). See also NN. 40 (27c) and 41 (26a).
7. ↑ Cf. Prof. F. Soddy in Nature, Nos. 2490 and 2491 (1917, 12th and 13th June).

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The Virtues of Big Government

by Robert Hunziker / July 7th, 2012

For decades now, actually since President Reagan’s administration, Republicans, with encouragement from Neocons, Supply-siders, Neoliberals, Tea Partiers, or, in short, the Right Wing in toto, have argued big government is evil, a bureaucratic money-trap that is inefficient without producing one iota of good for the country. As Ronald Reagan so infamously said, “Get big government off our backs.” This is a fallacious argument that, in reality, centers on the Right’s own selfish motives and desires to capture the country’s wealth for themselves in the shortest period of time possible, and, in large measure, they have been extraordinarily successful because their time-worn, primordial argument has become the nation’s commentary. It is time to change the argument!

Meanwhile, and dovetailing the Right’s extraordinary success in capturing a disproportionate share of national income, the government’s biggest problem, quite coincidentally, is a distorted tax code under which federal tax receipts, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, are at 50-year lows. Thus, starving the government of operating funds while dramatically enriching those at the very top of society in receipt of generous tax breaks. Along these lines, the effect of Supply-side policy on the U.S. government is comparable to IBM abruptly losing a big chunk of revenue on a contract it is still obligated to fulfill. As follows, IBM would be forced to borrow money to stay in business.

As things now stand, personal income tax rates in the United States are among the lowest of major economies of the developed world, e.g., lower than Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, Sweden, and Germany, whose top marginal income tax rate is 45%, but yet Germany is hailed as one of the most productive economies in the world. Another way to analyze America’s taxation levels relative to the world is by comparing tax rates as a share of Gross Domestic product, and on this score the U.S. is fourth amongst the lowest, ranking along side Turkey, Chile, and Mexico, of all 33-member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Interestingly, if U.S. tax rates were comparable to Germany’s, the federal government would likely run a surplus, or close to it, not an unmanageable deficit.

And, when did the U.S. government last run a budget surplus? President Clinton, whose policies ran against the grain of Supply-sider policy, balanced the budget. He raised taxes to accommodate the government, and he gave the country its best economic performance in decades. Clinton’s performance is proof positive the Supply-side mantra, and its policies, need to be dissolved, abolished, and reversed to efficiently run our democratic capitalist nation-state!

It is amazing how the Right continues to hammer away on tax cuts and deregulation as the cure-all solution for jobs, and American prosperity, when the evidence is so crystal clear that their platform (1) hinders job creation and (2) inexorably increases annual deficits. Indeed, with the onset of President Reagan’s administration, the United States became the world’s largest debtor nation, establishing a trend of annual budget deficits never before experienced since WWII.

The enclosed chart is a comparative review of the taxation policy effects of Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II, including their impact on job creation and government budgets. It is worth noting Clinton’s rejection of Supply-side economics performed very favorably with GDP, growing at an annualized rate of 3.9% almost double the growth rate of 2.1% for Bush I and 1.7% for Bush II. As a matter of record, Clinton’s GDP growth rate also outperformed Reagan’s. He outperformed these Supply-side policymakers by, in part, adopting anti-Supply-side policies. And, even more amazingly than Clinton, no modern-day president has outperformed the ultra big government President Lyndon Johnson (5% GDP growth rate), who surpassed all, even though the top marginal tax rate under his administration at 70% was double that of each Bush administration.
The question is: How can Supply-side policymakers continue to claim their policies of cutting taxes and removing governmental regulations grow the economy and create jobs?  The facts do not support the storyline, and, as for deregulation, look at what happens when they are regulated: BP/Gulf of Mexico.

President	Top Marginal Tax Rate	Jobs Created	Jobs% Increase	Annualized Deficit at End of Term
Bush I	28%-to-31%	2,592,000	2%	$300 Billion
Clinton	31% upped to 39.6%	22,744,000	21%	$  32   Billion
Bush II	39 cut to 35%	1,080,000	1%	$641 Billion

Since anti-Supply-side administrations consistently outperform Supply-siders, is it fair, and reasonable, to postulate that the government is a beneficial enterprise comparable to private corporations? This question is central to the argument supporting the value-added proposition of big government, the same as General Electric adds value to the nation’s economy, notwithstanding the fact the government already fulfills critical operational functions and infrastructure for the entire nation, benefiting all U.S. corporations by (1) providing for national defense (2) defining and securing property rights (3) promotion of fair competitiveness in markets (4) redistribution of income and reduction of hardship  (5) investment in public transportation and education (6) monitoring/addressing environmental issues, caretaker of the nation and (7) promotion, and stabilization, of economic growth via fiscal/monetary policies as well as international trade agreements.

The central problems with current governmental policies are centered around tendencies that lean to the Right, not to the Left, increasingly veering towards a totalitarian nation-state under the influence of Supply-side principles simply because, even though there is plenty of wealth to go around in the world, it’s tied up in too few hands for democratic capitalism to operate efficiently for society at large. Thus, in order to maintain civil order, totalitarianism increasingly becomes a byproduct of this conundrum.

Regarding the benefits of big government, this article would not be available on the Internet had it not been for a U.S. government initiative, following the Russian Sputnik success story in October 1957, that created ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a department of the US Department of Defense, which agency’s most famous project was the creation of the Internet.
And, as the result of innumerable research efforts by the government, America’s version of capitalism provides citizens the option of purchasing shares in private enterprise that benefit by government largess, like Facebook, Inc. or shares of Yahoo! and if the business is successfully operated, shareholders benefit by a rising value. Similarly, US taxpayers purchase shares in the US government by paying taxes, although not on a voluntary basis. Nevertheless, paying taxes purchases shares, i.e., ownership in America. Otherwise, there would be no citizens or nation-state. Paying taxes entitles one to citizenship and ownership of the United States of America, Inc., similar to when a park ranger informs visitors upon entering the Grand Canyon National Park; this is “your park.” The question thus becomes, is the government a good investment?

Contrary to private enterprise, the incalculable benefits of governmental research and investments are mostly hidden from view, for example, according to the Federation of American Societies For Experimental Biology: “Public funds promote the climate of openness and sharing that accelerate the process of discovery, verification, and product development. While the private sector is important to research and development in this country, the federal government is the only source able to provide the broad, long-term support necessary for basic research…. If left totally to market forces, basic research would be under funded since the gains from basic research are shared and the profits may not be captured by private investors… The Council on Competitiveness (a nonprofit council of 161 corporate chief executives, university presidents, and labor leaders) recommends that the federal government increase its investment in basic research.”

As seen from the viewpoint of private owners of business, the main indicator of economic efficiency in capitalism is profits. But from the point of view of national economic development, social costs and social benefits, which are not reflected in profitability, can be no less important. As one example, companies that dismiss employees to enhance their profitability do not necessarily improve the efficiency of the nation’s economy as a whole. Corporate dismissal, or firing, of workers often times contributes to profitability, referred to as downsizing, which is a key corporate expression these past decades. Meanwhile, this enhanced corporate profitability comes at a social cost to the nation’s economy, as a whole, via growth in unemployment, casting a burden upon the nation-state. Indeed, without the nation-state as a backstop to the effects of corporate layoffs, it is likely the nation-state would fail as a viable entity by not providing for its citizens and chaos would result. This phenomenon is what America has been experiencing.

The U.S. federal government is America’s biggest business, it employs more people, who are subject to higher tax rates than most elected leaders, buys more products, owns more real estate, constructs more buildings, insures more investments, and borrows more money than any organization in the world, and private enterprise is the government’s biggest customer, benefiting Halliburton, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, IBM, General Foods, Boeing, Ford, and, in fact, all of the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The federal government is the largest single customer for America’s industrial products and services, and the government directly, and indirectly, supports most of the research done in the country, according to: The American Private Enterprise System, The University of Kentucky and Kentucky Council of Cooperatives, ongoing series of studies.

Thus, the value proposition for big government enterprise is a positive one. The federal government is, in almost all respects, similar to any U.S. corporation, and it is the country’s biggest corporation and 100% owned by the its citizens, employing people, paying wages, and providing the necessary infrastructure for the profitability of the country as a whole. This is the United States of America, Inc.

However, the burning issue of Supply-side economics, entrenched in American politics for decades, is the result of a small, but extraordinarily and overwhelmingly powerful, vocal faction that does not equitably pay for services rendered by the nation-state. Herein lies the “where,” and “how” of America retrieving its status as the world’s most productive economy… by reversing Supply-side policies. Otherwise, if Mitt Romney, who pays a “carried interest” tax rate of 15%, wins the highest office in “the land of opportunity,” and follows his principles, the United States of America, Inc. will undergo drastic downsizing, abiding by a practice that is deeply imbedded in the corporate mindset. Bain Capital has him well prepared.

Robert Hunziker, a former hedge fund manager, is a professional independent negotiator for worldwide commodity actual transactions and a freelance writer for progressive publications as well as business journals. Mr. Hunziker earned an MA degree in economic history at DePaul University/Chicago, and he resides in Los Angeles. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

This article was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2012 at 8:00am and is filed under Classism, Economy/Economics, Tax.