Some Standard Wisdom for Purifying Politics

Some of the most interesting and surprising stories in the Christian Standard are in the "Current Topics" section, a kind of miscellany that includes comments on current news, politically charged barbs, and sarcastic quips. Here is a tidbit about one of what have probably been hundreds of failed political reform movements (should we read in this a prediction of how history will treat the Occupy movement?). Whatever its ultimate fate, the editorial staff at the Standard had high hopes for what seems to be a fairly simple proposition:

We hail with joy the Independent Scratchers, whose mission is a purification of politics. It is urged that while the worst elements of a party may secure the nomination of unfit men, nothing but the apathy of the best elements will secure their election. T he independent scratchers propose to defeat those men—and only those—on a ticket who are known to be corrupt. This will force the nomination of honest men, and be an effectual “brake” on machine politics. It has already done effective service, and is destined to play an increasing part in our public affairs.

Denying the Holocaust: Albany Teacher Suspended for Teaching Nazism

The Nazis are stealing your children!

Nazis are bad. I learned that lesson in high school like everyone else, though, let's be honest, we all knew that Nazis were bad before we ever made it to high school. Nevertheless, that is the lesson I was taught. Nothing more; nothing less. At Albany High School in New York, one teacher tried to take this lesson a little further in three sophomore English classes:

As part of the 10th grade English persuasive writing assignment, the Albany High students were asked to pretend their teacher is a Nazi government official who must be convinced they believe Jews are the source of Germany's problems: "You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"

The teacher is on leave, facing possible termination, because school officials and government leaders were appalled. Said Superintendent Vanden Wyngaard, "You asked a child to support the notion that the Holocaust was justified, that's my struggle. It's an illogical leap for a student to make." Said New York City Councilmen David Greenfield, "The teacher responsible for coming up with and assigning students with this task must be held accountable for attempting to indoctrinate children with anti-Semitic beliefs." Said Director of the Jewish Federation Shelly Shapiro "It's not how you teach about how prejudice has led to genocide."

Well it certainly was not how I was taught that prejudice led to genocide. I learned, "Prejudice leads to genocide. It happened with the Nazis. So don't be prejudiced like the Nazis." And that was it. Something tells me that Shapiro is short-selling the pedagogical value of what is happening here. These students, in addition to learning a valuable lesson in English (because no creative writer has only had to write the perspective of laudable characters with whom everyone agrees), would take away from this assignment a powerful and deep understanding of not merely the tired truism that "prejudice has led to genocide" but an experience of precisely how it led to genocide. It teaches the student, in the most basic way, what it was to be a civilian in Nazi Germany, under a government that flooded the intellectual marketplace with antisemitic propaganda and expected you to learn a new cultural script to mirror it. The applications extend far beyond merely a better grasp of the history of 1930s Germany to a life lesson in the way propaganda continues to be employed and continues to shape the thinking of citizens around the world. Some clever honors student might even have concluded that the consumption of media in contemporary America might be shaping his or her thought in similar ways.

Renowned scholar of religion and American culture Stephen Prothero draws much the same conclusion:

I think it’s Greenfield who is lacking in common sense here. And it's the superintendent who is being illogical.

I suppose it is possible that the teacher is a closet Nazi attempting to reconstruct the Third Reich in Albany. But isn’t it more likely that he or she is trying to teach students about the dangers of propaganda and the horrors of the Holocaust?

Consider the student who felt “horrible” about doing this assignment. Is that really a bad thing? How are high school students today supposed to feel about Nazism and the Holocaust?

Apparently, what they are supposed to feel (and think) is nothing, because the lesson high school teachers are going to take away from this fiasco is to avoid this topic at all costs, lest they risk losing their jobs.

Prothero points to a further dimension of "this fiasco," the special place of the Holocaust in the American imagination. Historian John Fea has pointed out that if the principles espoused here to teaching the Holocaust were universally applied, teachers could no longer teach the thinking of Puritans who killed witches, settlers who killed Native Americans, southerners who kept slaves, nativist who oppressed Catholic immigrants, etc. What a moralistic history we are left with! And an incomplete history at that, a half history. Of course, no one would ever suggest hamstringing historians on those topics because they are not blessed by the kind of special pleading that surrounds the Holocaust. There is no villain like Hitler, no enormity like the Holocaust, and no racism like antisemitism. That, in the end, is the kind of lesson we were taught by the two-dimensional treatment of Nazism in school. No depth, no perspective, because the history of Nazism is alone a truly simple matter in history. It is a lesson against thinking for most students, and it is a tragedy that this teacher should suffer for bringing thought--in the form of an entertaining thought experiment the like of which I never enjoyed in high school or college--back into the subject of Nazism.

I hope the teacher is reinstated, because termination over something so ridiculous is unthinkable. I also hope the teacher is fired, because to take any punishment, even a slap on the wrist, and then return willingly to that environment of educational repression strikes me as a tacit admission that the teacher actually did something wrong. Of course, the teacher is probably sitting at home now worrying about paying bills, working long enough to retire some day, and coping with social ostracism. So what I really hope is that whatever the teacher wants happens. It's a shame that it had to go this far.

Parsing Justice: Jill Lindsey Harrison's Pesticide Drift

Image by MIT Press

In the course of batting around with a colleague the possibility of doing a paper about a biblical approach to environmental justice, I picked up Jill Lindsey Harrison's Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice and, candidly, was disappointed. For those who are not familiar with the environmental justice movement, as I wasn't until recently, it is an attempt to correct what are seen as deficiencies in earlier environmental activism. It does this by recognizing the overlap between environmental and social justice problems, especially the disproportionate environmental burden born by those who are socially and economically marginalized and the same peoples' lack of voice in crafting environmental policy. Though the movement has been around for decades, and gained steam in the nineties, recently historians (like Ted Steinberg and Thomas G. Andrews), sociologists (like Harrison), and activists have begun to stress more and more that when environmental disasters "strike," they affect the poor and racial minorities more acutely than anyone else. It is a trenchant critique of the system, one that demands the attention of any and all concerned either with environmental ethics or with social equity. I certainly do not want to imply by my critique of Harrison that there is some flaw in the environmental justice perspective. My problem with Pesticide Drift is more academic and less foundational.

Harrison's book is not, first and foremost, an apology for environmental justice, though she does more than her fair share of preaching. Instead, she turns her critical eye on the movement's own perception of its place in the greater environmental discussion to point out an error in thinking among environmental justice advocates.

My aim in this book is to both uphold and amend this EJ argument. This book pivots around...a case that illustrates in sharp, present detail how the workings of "raw power" shift the burden of pesticide pollution to the bodies of California's most marginalized and vulnerable residents. That said, I also challenge the claim that environmental inequalities exist because mainstream (i.e., non-EJ) environmental politics are devoid of justice. I contend instead that environmental inequalities emerge from the cruelty and malfeasance, but also from the ways in which many well-intentioned actors are engaging in efforts to make California agriculture more environmentally sustainable.

Or, in other words, the road to the toxic contamination of Hispanic communities is paved with good intentions. It strikes me as something of an obvious point, but one that undoubtedly still needed to be made considering how haughty activists can be in the presentation of their causes as just and their methods as the lone means of achieving that justice. So, with the aim of exploring how alternate theories of justice have unintentionally collaborated with pesticides to create an environmental and social disaster, Harrison gives an overview of the pesticide drift problem in southern California and the many fateful ways that individuals, industry, and the regulatory bodies of the state have failed to prevent it.

Except that Harrison never actually proves her central claim, that there are other theories of justice operating in the various responses to environmental issues. That is not, of course, to say that she is wrong. Her proposition, having been stated, is so self-evident that it undoubtedly will stand without a proper defense. Her book, however, lacks a raison d'être without it. Harrison proposes the existence of two alternate theories of justice: the libertarian and communitarian. The former sees justice as primarily concerned with upholding personal property rights. The latter holds the community is best positioned to locate and enact justice. It is a simple taxonomy, so simple that it elucidates nothing for the reader. It would be just as convincing to say that a libertarian sense of freedom is centered on private property, or a libertarian conception of personal well-being. Or you could leave out "justice" altogether and say that libertarians focus on private property. Communitarians focus on the community. It says nothing about "justice" to collapse an entire worldview into it: Christian justice is cristocentric, utilitarian justice stresses utility. Harrison had the opportunity to explore the notions of justice--the ideas, the impulses, the cultural drivers--that inspire these alternate responses to environmental issues, but she declined to pursue any deeper than the most superficial definition of what "justice" might mean outsider her own movement.

Instead, she spends the majority of her time taking libertarianism and communitarianism to task more generally. (After all, not having defined their visions of justice with any rigor, it would be hard to do otherwise.) Libertarians have a false hope in the power of the person working in concert with the market. Individuals, while laudable in their efforts to farm sustainably, inevitably lack the ability to affect such a systemic issue as pesticide drift and struggle with the economic disincentive to do so. Industry, less laudable (why is not clear) has an even more powerful economic disincentive to create sustainable farming techniques, not when the pesticide industry is a multi-billion dollar quasi-monopoly for a handful of companies. Politicians, incentivized by industry, are content to shirk off their responsibility in exchange for campaign contributions. Communitarians are similarly naive in their assumption that a community can correct a structural issue in society and achieve social justice. Even agrifood advocates, the rank and file of the sustainable agriculture activists reading Michael Pollan and shopping at Whole Foods, reflect the kind of wealthy middle class assumptions about choice that cannot function for the impoverished communities that bear the brunt of environmental injustice. The problem with both mindsets is that problems of the size and scale of pesticide drift "require substantial government intervention" (189).*

Harrison is more than willing to set out detailed proposals for how to enact the environmental justice vision of justice on a national level, and for those who are interested only in exploring environmental justice policy, I can with all sincerity recommend (at least the last chapter of) Pesticide Drift. But for anyone expecting to have presented a compelling new intellectual framework for considering the way justice operates in environmental politics, Harrison proves an unforgivable tease. The book which will explore justice as an environmental concept in pre-EJ environmentalists, in industry, or in alternate political philosophies cries out to be written. Perhaps, if time and good fortune permit, we may yet make a contribution to that discussion by considering the implications a biblical approach to justice might have for environmental justice. In the meantime, Harrison has promised to fill a void and only stepped in to show us how empty it still is.

*(It is here that the regular reader will expect me to launch into a tirade about the gross inadequacy of the state to achieve anything of lasting good. I did just that in my personal conversations with my colleague who, like Harrison, seems to believe that after fifty years of intensive federal environmental legislation, the reason we are not seeing the kind of improvements we want is because we are simply not surrendering enough power to the state. I won't distract myself with that nonsense here.)

Japan through a Lens

The New York Review of Books blog has a fascinating article on the work of Hamaya Hiroshi, a famous Japanese photographer. The article is in honor of an exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (if anyone is fortunate enough to be in the region) and includes some really exemplary samples of of his work (which I won't share here, because I am not all that confident in my grasp of fair use). For the historian, however, the article holds an interest all its own as it explores the way art and artists can be instrumental in the construction of national identity and, consequently, complicit in some of the more atrocious features of a nation's military and cultural imperialism. This is not an indictment of Hayama, of course, but an invitation into the world behind the photographs and their continuing aesthetic appeal. The parallels in other cultures are obvious. The article offers a contemporary examples of Nazis plundering Polish art looking for their own Teutonic heritage. Norman Rockwell springs to mind as an artist who constructed as much as reflected American national, cultural identity. But the example of Hayama suggests that art can work in more subtle ways:

Hamaya was born in a plebeian district of Tokyo, and his early photographs of the 1930s are of its typical denizens: geisha, beggars, prostitutes, and burlesque dancers. Typical urban scenes, in other words. His rejection of this world for the primitive life of peasants in the Snow Country is an interesting example of how important art can emerge from questionable motives....

This was the time when, encouraged by a famous Japanese businessman with ethnographic interests, Hamaya first set off for the Snow Country. The idea was to document the true “Japanese spirit.” Living among the northeastern peasants, recording their dignity in the face of hardship, was for him a “return to Japan.”

I will let you see where it goes from there, but the article and the exhibit both strike me as worthwhile for more than just the stunning photographs included. It is unfortunate that one is so much easier to access than the other.

Some Standard Wisdom for Avoiding Epidemics

Continuing with the theme of amusing ourselves at the expense of the level of scientific and technical knowledge in 1880, the Christian Standard published extensive quotes from and commentary on an article by E. W. Cushing which first appeared in the International Review:

We are apparently on the climax—which arrives in 1882—of a cycle of epidemics, which coincides with the sun spots of some eleven years and a fraction. As he argues, it is a time of great disturbances in temperatures, etc….After a carefully prepared table of the great epidemics known in history, which are shown to correspond very clearly with the semi-changes, he concludes: “Now what can these general influences be, this general cause, this morbific influence of an unknown nature? Does the earth itself change periodically? No. Does the mass of air or water change? No. What can change them? The force, the heat, the energy which is derived directly from the sun. Does this change regularly, periodically, and at intervals corresponding with those of this pestilence? It certainly does; and all these strange natural phenomena which we have seen to have been observed in all ages as the forerunners or accompaniments of epidemics are now known to depend on, or at least to coincide with, the changes of solar energy corresponding with the sun spot cycle. Here is certainly the post hoc; shall we not admit the propter hoc?”

Depending on what the fraction is in "eleven years and a fraction," I fear we may be due for another period of epidemic disease in 2013. Oh wait.

Robert E. Lee on History and Hope

Here is another intriguing quote from Robert E. Lee that I picked up in my readings (I believe, again, from Charles Reagan Wilson):

My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them; nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures, which I lament, or errors, which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present state of affairs, do I despair of the future. The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient, the work of progress so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble, the life of humanity is so long, and that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

I agree with Lee up until he invokes history. History has taught me everything except to hope in our feeble means of aiding progress. What discourages me is not the photograph of existence that I will experience before I wither like grass in a field, although it certainly would be enough. It is my understanding of history, of seeing how far we have advanced in the art we have made of sin, that makes me despair of progress. Though not of the future; on that Lee and I agree. But my confidence in the future is not based on history or progress but on the providence that Lee so emptily evokes. It is because I can mimic the words of another southern preacher quoted in Wilson: "His ends embrace the universe; His purposes are co-extensive with Time." I do not give myself over to despair precisely because, unlike Lee, I abandon any belief that man is a causal agent in progress or in attaining the object of our collective hope. My hope is in the Lord.

Some Standard Wisdom for Curing Scoliosis

To fill the gaping hole left in my heart, not to mention my schedule, by Dorothy Day, I am inaugurating a new weekly series today derived from the Christian Standard. Founded in 1866 by a group of progressively-minded Disciples (including future president James A. Garfield), the Christian Standard was the flagship paper for the growth and mainstreaming of the Disciples Movement. It continues publishing into the present.

My recent research has brought me into intimate contact with the 1880 editions of the paper while it was under the headship of its first and greatest editor, Isaac Errett. I tried desperately to focus exclusively on the development of church-state thought among the Disciples, as my research dictated, but my attention was constantly diverted to the dozens of amusing, intriguing, and insulting articles that appeared constantly in the pages of the Standard. It is those articles, unrelated to my research and, more often than not, unrelated to much of anything at all, that I propose to share. Some will likely be entertaining, either because they were intended to be or because they titillate our need to feel superior by virtue of our historical progress--as the one today does. Others will stimulate the curiosity of those of us who have an interest in Disciples history, particularly as it pertains to ongoing controversies within the churches of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Still others will offend. It is critical to remember that in quoting those articles, I intend neither an endorsement of the expressed view nor a judgmental critique. I present them as a historian hoping to elucidate key issues in the history of a religious movement and of the broader American culture of the post-bellum nineteenth century.

A wonderful starting point seems to be this bit of medical advice, pilfered by the Christian Standard from an article by Dr. Dio Lewis in the Congregationalist entitled "Crooked Spines."

The only way to straighten the spine, no matter what the curvature may be, is to strengthen the muscles of the spine. And the best possible way to do this is to carry a weight on the head. The best weight is a sheepskin bag containing from ten to fifty pounds of sand. the bag should be not quite full, so it will fit down upon the head and balance well. The weight may at first be light, but soon it should be from thirty to fifty pounds for a man, and from ten to thirty for a child or woman. The greatest weight you can carry will do no harm. In the morning while reading or studying carry this bag, walking slowly about with the spine erect, and chin close to the neck until you are tired. Do the same thing going to bed at night. In one month you will experience happy results. Your neck will be stronger, and the spine straighter and stronger. In twelve months you will lay up such treasures of straight strong spine as will last you a long time.