Film has lost two of its greatest visionaries, within days of each other

From the soaring heights of The Seventh Seal to the psychological lows of Persona to the nostalgic perfection of Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman was a personal inspiration and trendsetter in film for decades.

Bergman passed on the 29th.

Michaelangelo Antonioni passed on the 30th. His works include the existential masterpiece Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point and countless other staples of Italian cinema.

This loss can only be equated to the loss of such auteur directors as Kieslowski, Fellini and Altman.

As has already been said elsewhere – someone keep an eye on Herzog and Godard.

I wanted to revise my earlier post criticizing capitalism but I think I can accomplish more, rhetorically, by restating my criticism in a more compact and loaded form. I expect that there will be questions and some need to clarify but I hope all that can be done in the comments. The basic law is unquestioned in economic history. Mises accepted it. Ricardo popularized it. Marx believed in it. The Marginalist found in it the dynamic that shaped their whole system. George followed it to its logical conclusion.

The law of rent states that the cost of securing exclusive access to a land site (economically termed “rent”) is equal [in the long run] to the economic advantage obtained by using the site in its most productive use relative to the advantage obtained by using marginal (rent-free) land for the same purpose, given the same inputs of labor and capital. The marginalist took this idea and applied to many other goods and services thereby developing the now uncontroversial principle of Marginal Utility.

There are, of course, important implications of this law. The most important is that the law of rent sets marginal wages [in the long run]. It explains why new cities see higher real wages than older cities and it explains why increases in productive power tend to only raise wages in the short term. It also explains why economic growth is important if one wants to increase real wages.

Notice what follows from the follwing economic fact:

Production = Rent + Wages + Interest

Then:

Production – Rent = Wages + Interest.

Thus, wages and interest do not depend on what labor and capital produce, they depend on what is left after rent is taken out. So it doesn’t matter [in the long run]how much they actually produce because they only receive what they could get on land free of rent (marginal land). No matter how much productive power increases, neither wages nor interest can rise if the increase in rent keeps pace with it.

So, my problem with capitalism is simple. Over time, the rich get much richer and the poor slightly more richer depending on GNP growth. Wealth is not appropriated fairly, that is, based on labor and risk, it is more generally appropriated based on monopoly and rent-extracting power. This becomes especially so as time goes on and rent catches up to wages and interest.

Yesterday I was with most of you in here Springfield. It was great to see the guys that I communicate with daily on here but haven’t seen in person in some time. Oh, and Sage, thanks for the beer. Oh, and Branden too, thanks for the other beer.

Sitting in Q’doba (sipping “the best margarita you’ll ever have in a plastic cup”), we talked movies. A couple guys were rather excited for the new Transformers movie, and I scoffed. When pinned down and questioned as to the root of my arrogant elitism, I answered that that kind of movie isn’t art; it’s mere entertainment.

So what’s wrong with that? Is there no room for mindless entertainment? I was asked.

I’m not saying that, I said. I just get no pleasure out of it. It doesn’t entertain me.

And I’ve thought of this conversation ever since. I am puzzled at folks whose heart races at the thought of satisfying childhood nostalgia but thinks a good work like Little Miss Sunshine to be less than worthy. I’m convinced this discrepancy has to do with what attributes we are evaluating when judging a film or any other piece of art.

Too many Christians–indeed, most of the ones I know–want one of two kinds of art (whether it be movies, music, literature, painting): moralistic art that teaches a lesson consistant with their personal value system or mindless art that presents no apparent challenge to their personal value system.

I have a big problem with both of these types. I agree with what most Christian scholars who study the intersection of art and faith conclude: the way to glorify God in one’s art is not to preach a message through it but to shape it as finely as you can, to master the craft. No matter your personal worldview, it will shine through. That’s the beauty of art; it’s subtle. Straight communication is direct. It’s the difference between poetry and an instruction manual. Or Andrei Rublev and Transformers.

Precious Moments, Left Behind, Frank Perretti, Thomas Kinkade, all have the apparence of godliness without the substance. This is because they all lack the true craftliness that good art requires. Oh sure, Kinkade can paint a house in the woods with better perspective than I may, but his steady hand lacks the creative eye that a masterful, artistic sensiblity requires.

True art, true beauty isn’t always so pretty and obvious. Think of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ). A crucifix in a jar of urine. His hand didn’t create a painting your grandma would buy at the local Bible bookstore to hang above her couch, but his artist-mind is far superior in that he concieved an image that speaks in a much deeper manner concerning spirituality. He doesn’t show us a faith as we’d like it to be but one that is.

Andrew Hudgins’s poem (www.slate.com/id/74144/) illuminates this image in an incredible way:

We have grown used to beauty without horror.
We have grown used to useless beauty.

An interview with the artist on issues of faith and art is found here: http://www.communityarts.net/reading…ing_the_kl.php.

I’ve made art my interest, passion, and hopefully someday my livelihood. The only time I’m not thinking about it is when I’m thinking about my faith. And with all that, all the thinking and reading I do in this topic, I can’t in good conscience find my self sitting in a theater, popcorn can in one hand, soda cup in the other, watching Transformers. Or Ratatouille. Instead, take me to The Moxie and show me Paris, Je T’Aime so I can thereby satisfy my arrogant elitism in good conscience–with pita chips and garlic hummus in one hand and a glass of wine in the other.

The Myth of Reganomics

Doug Wilson (not everyone’s fav) wrote an article that explains what I have been trying to explain (poorly) is my discomfort with what some are putting forth as critiques of the “free market”.

I would be interested to hear what you think about this article.

(viuaI recently came across this neat program, where if you type in your address it calculates where the nearest “walkable” stores, parks, libraries, etc. are.

Where I currently live has a walk score of 51 out of 100 – meaning that about half of everything is walkable, or that it’s almost at the edge of walkability.

Where I’m planning to move has a score of 98 out of 100 – Everything you could possibly want is in walking distance. Gotta love New York City.

Anyway, plug in your address and see how walk-able your home, or work is!

http://www.walkscore.com/

(via notkot.com)

Sean Penn has directed a new film, Into the Wild, based on Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name. Should release soon.

Could you guys listen to this, critique it and provide me some honest feedback (good or bad) both on content and presentation?

After some of our discussions about community and the poor, I was given an opportunity to speak at my church and I want to know what you guys think.

You should be able to listen to both the introduction (announcement) and the full sermon from the link above.

“Acorn Gal”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPsZZ87Djpc

“Dedicated to my future boyfriend, Tyler”

!!

Justice

THERE are many earnest souls occupied in trying to do people good.

There are nine million societies, more or less, organized to improve and to ameliorate.

There are preachers, missionaries, evangelists, reformers, exhorters, viewers-with-pride, and pointers-with-alarm without number wrestling with sinners.

All forms of industry are booming these days in the U. S. A., but the uplift business is still several laps ahead.

It seems ungracious to say a word to any enthusiastic person who is engaged in so laudable an enterprise as that of rescuing the perishing, feeding the hungry, and healing the sick.

And yet, when you take time to think right through to the bottom of things, you must come to the conclusion that there is but one real, radical and effective way to help your fellow-men, and that is the way called justice.

If I want to redeem the world I can come nearer my object, and do less harm, by being just toward myself and just toward everybody else, than by “doing good” to people.

The only untainted charity is justice.

Often our ostensible charities serve but to obscure and palliate great evils.

Conventional charity drops pennies in the beggar’s cup, carries bread to the starving, distributes clothing to the naked. Real charity, which is justice, sets about removing the conditions that make beggary,
starvation, and nakedness.

Conventional charity plays Lady Bountiful; justice tries to establish such laws as shall give employment to all, so that they need no bounty.

Charity makes the Old Man of the Sea feed sugar-plums to the poor devil he is riding and choking; justice would make him get off his victim’s back.

Conventional charity piously accepts things as they are, and helps the unfortunate; justice goes to the legislature and changes things.

Charity swats the fly; justice takes away the dung-heaps that breed flies.

Charity gives quinine in the malarial tropics; justice drains the swamps.

Charity sends surgeons and ambulances and trained nurses to the war; justice struggles to secure that internationalism that will prevent war.

Charity works among slum wrecks; justice dreams and plans that there be no more slums.

Charity scrapes the soil’s surface; justice subsoils.

Charity is affected by symptoms; justice by causes.

Charity assumes evil institutions and customs to be a part of “Divine Providence,” and tearfully works away at taking care of the wreckage; justice regards injustice everywhere, custom-buttressed and
respectable or not, as the work of the devil, and vigorously attacks it.

Charity is timid and is always passing the collection-box; justice is unafraid and asks no alms, no patrons, no benevolent support.

“It is presumed,” says Henry Seton Merriman, “that the majority of people are willing enough to seek the happiness of others; which desire leads the individual to interfere with his neighbor’s affairs, while it burdens society with a thousand associations for the welfare of mankind or the raising of the masses.”

The best part of the human race does not want help, nor favor, nor charity; it wants a fair chance and a square deal.

Charity is man’s kindness.

Justice is God’s.

—–

BEND, Ore. – Last weekend, Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some snacks – and a parachute. Attached to his lawn chair were 105 large helium balloons.

Destination: Idaho.

With instruments to measure his altitude and speed, a global positioning system device in his pocket, and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as ballast – he could turn a spigot, release water and rise – Couch headed into the Oregon sky.

Nearly nine hours later, the 47-year-old gas station owner came back to earth in a farmer’s field near Union, short of Idaho but about 193 miles from home.

“When you’re a little kid and you’re holding a helium balloon, it has to cross your mind,” Couch told the Bend Bulletin.

“When you’re laying in the grass on a summer day, and you see the clouds, you wish you could jump on them,” he said. “This is as close as you can come to jumping on them. It’s just like that.”

Couch is the latest American to emulate Larry Walters – who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons. Walters had surprised an airline pilot, who radioed the control tower that he had just passed a guy in a lawn chair. Walters paid a $1,500 penalty for violating air traffic rules.

It was Couch’s second flight.

My mom wrote a comment under the French Revolution post that was a bit off topic but nevertheless quite interesting – full of complicated, deep, and widespread assumptions and ideas. The essence of her post was that Socialism and Communism do not follow from a Christian understanding of human nature and that any system that does not follow from a true understanding of human nature would fail while a system that more closely approximates that Christian understanding would succeed. Capitalism has succeeded in history and capitalism is based on a Christian understanding of human nature and should thus be accepted by Christians. In my mom’s understanding Capitalism not only creates more wealth than any other system but also distributes it more justly.

Of course there is much that could be said about this view, both good and bad, but I think it would best if we look at one statement in particular.

Mom wrote:

“In the real world, capitalism creates more wealth than any alternative economic system and distributes it more justly.”

Although the former claim is clearly true (capitalism does in fact produce more wealth) the later is loaded. In fact, as we take a look at the assumption in that idea we will find not only that the statement is not true but it will also be not true that Capitalism follows from a Christian view of the human person.

The assumption in the idea that capitalism distributes wealth justly is that 1) the laborer is the just recipient of his wage, 2) the capital owner is the just recipient of his interest, and 3) the land owner is the just recipient of his rent. The claim that capitalism distributes wealth justly is only true in so far as the three factors of production, land, labor, and capital, and the proceeds that follow from the contribution of each in the act of production represent in themselves a just distribution.

In order to judge the “justness” of each we must first define a first principle from which we can measure each. The first principle of economic justice is considered self-evident by most and was popularized in the writings of John Locke. It is that the laborer is the just owner of the fruit of his labor. The trespassing of this first principle is the very definition of theft.

If Jeremiah, in a state of nature, decides to plant some corn we see from this principle that he alone is the just owner of the fruit of his labor (the corn harvest). He may sell that corn to whomever he likes for whatever price he likes or he may eat the corn himself. What he does with the corn is between himself and God. Now, this is not to say that Jeremiah’s religious beliefs may not require him to, say, give some of his corn to his needy neighbor or to some poor bum named Tyler but that decision should, in all justness, be left up to him. Economists and Philosophers call this Individual Sovereignty. Man has rights to his own body and, by extension, the fruit of his hands.

Now, let us follow this principle a step further. Say Jeremiah harvests a large crop of corn one year but is eyeing some luscious organic tomatoes growing in Branden’s garden across the way. [...]

I’ve been reading this classic work, which I would happily recommend to just about anyone, and found in it some really great quotes that Mr. Howard references.

Enjoy.

“How can a man learn to know himself? By reflection never – only by action. In the measure that thou seekest to do thy duty shalt though know what is in thee. But what is thy duty? The demand of the hour.”
– Goethe

“I will not cease from mental strife.
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.”
- Blake

“When drainage everywhere, with its double functions, restoring what it takes away, is accomplished, then, this being combined with the data of a new social economy, the products of the earth will be increased tenfold, and the problem of misery will be wonderfully diminished. Add the suppression of parasitism and it will be solved.”
– Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“The difficulty felt about Communism…is that it interferes with man’s freedom to make demands for his many-sided nature, and to endeavor to satisfy those demands. It secures bread to all, perhaps, but it ignores the doctrine that man shall not live by bread alone. The future probably lies with those who, instead of pitting against one another, Socialism and Individualism, will seek to realize a true, vital, organic conception of Society and of the State in which both Individualism and Socialism will have a proper share. The bark which carries civilized man with his fortunes will thus steer an even course between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of despotism.”
– Daily Chronicle, 2nd July 1894.

“Human beings, in their present condition, may be likened to bees in the act of swarming, as we see them clinging in a mass to a single bough. Their position is a temporary one, and must inevitably be changed. They must rise and find themselves a new abode. Every bee knows this, and is eager to shift its own position, as well as that of the others, but not one of them will do so until the whole swarm rises. The swarm cannot rise, because one bee clings to the other and prevents it from separating itself from the swarm, and so they all continue to hang. It might seem as if there were no deliverance from this position, precisely as it seems to men of the world who have become entangled in the social net. Indeed, there would be no outlet for the bees if each one were not a living creature possessed of a pair of wings. Neither would there be any issue for men if each one were not a living individual being, gifted with a capacity for assimilating the Christian life-conception. If among these bees who are able to fly not one could be found willing to start, the swarm would never change its position. And it is the same among men. If the man who has assimilated the Christian life-conception waits for others before he proceeds to live in accordance with it, mankind will never change its attitude. And as all that is needed to change a solid mass of bees into a flying swarm is for one bee to spread its wings and fly away, when the second, the third, the tenth and the hundredth will follow suit; so all that is needed to break through the magic circle of social life, deliverance from which seems so hopeless, is that one man should view life from a Christian standpoint and begin to frame his own life accordingly, whereupon others will follow in his footsteps.”
—LEO TOLSTOY, The Kingdom of God is Within You

Ordinary as Brown Dirt
Just a quick Fourth of July note. Hope you set off lots of fireworks, and eat lots of hamburgers. But here’s also hoping that you do it with a clear head.

This civil holiday celebrates resistance to tyranny. And of course, some of the most ardent participants at such events are those who want to justify contemporary tyranny, the kind who want to keep everybody well occupied over celebrations of resistance to yesteryear’s tyrants.

Advocates of the new global neo-conservatism have been pressing heavily on what they call American exceptionalism. There is a trick here, so I want everyone to follow closely. I agree that America’s founders were exceptional men, and they established our form of government on an exceptional document, unlike anything in the history of the world up to that point. So I do believe in a form of American exceptionalism.

But what was exceptional about it? Here is the trick. They knew that Americans were not in the slightest bit exceptional. That’s exceptional. A patriotic pride in your nation being the apex of whatever it is we are doing on this planet — a belief that “we” (whoever “we” might be) are somehow unique — is as ordinary as brown dirt.

Calling yourself exceptional isn’t. Recognizing that we are mortal men just like other mortal men, and that we are vulnerable to all the same temptations, is rare. Boasting in American achievements barely manages to clear that Ozymandian low bar — it is the kind of ordinary hubris nailed in a poem that was written before we defeated the Nazis, landed on the moon, built the space shuttle, and started selling iPhones that could serve as navigation systems for the space shuttle — and when we invite mighty observers to look on our works and despair, we are acting like pretty much everybody else in the history of the world.

The neocons don’t get this at all. Our founders did. They did not revolt against the king because he was British (or German, whatever), but rather because he was a tyrant, acquiescing in Parliament’s unconstitutional power grabs. And they built a form of government that presupposed that Americans were every bit as likely to fall victim to a lust for power, and they put as many firewalls into the founding as they could think of. Why did they do this? They did it because America will act just like every other nation has when it has gotten fat and sassy. Congress could easily become Parliament and worse, just as it has.

The founders knew that tyrants could easily come to occupy the positions of authority in our nation, and they tried to protect against it. But our modern apologists serve up a notion of American exceptionalism that pretends that we don’t need to protect against it. This is dangerously wrong, and it is idolatrous to boot.

So set off the fireworks . . . but only if you are teaching your children what they mean.”

—Doug Wilson