Just think about that: if Maxwell is right, we’ve still got seven years until peak oil, and gas is $4 a gallon. Of course, he could be wrong. ASPO has claimed that peak oil was actually last year. If we figure that they’ve missed production growth and demand destruction that the ‘No. 1 analyst’ has accounted for, things will actually get much worse in the next decade. But whether it’s already happened or the worst is yet to come, it’s much more likely that it’s immanent than that it’s a myth. Yet there are still some peak oil deniers out there muddying the waters of consensus. What’s worst, the principle deniers are the ones best situated to know the truth and benefit from it, and their denials may actually be against their own pecuniary interest! Weird.

Thankfully, the financial analysts that businesses listen to is actually criticizing ExxonMobil for its shortsightedness:

“It really does Rex Tillerson no good to keep denying that oil production will be peaking,” he says. “Exxon’s business plan is from the past 150 years.”

“Abstaining from questions involving formal sovereignty and territorial governance is one thing. To hold the political branches have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will is quite another. The former position reflects this Court’s recognition that certain matters requiring political judgments are best left to the political branches. The latter would permit a striking anomaly in our tripartite system of government, leading to a regime in which Congress and the President, not this Court, say “what the law is.” (Boumediene v. Bush, 35-6)

Dear Wystan Auden -

I just read the Falstaff piece — had some trouble getting the old issue of Encounter –, think it is quite wonderful, have a number of points I’d like to raise, especially about Greek tragedy; but am writing now because of “forgiving.”

You invoke Christian charity, but don’t you think Christian charity is curiously absent from these passages? You convinced me that a line should be drawn between forgiveness and judicial pardon. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Christian charity has more in common with judicial pardon than with forgiving. The Law, like charity, looks upon all with an equal eye, makes no distinctions, has no regard for the person, and may pardon even if he does not repent. Judicial pardon shares with forgiving that it pardons a crime for the sake of the person who did it. (It will hardly pardon Bluebeard who is a murderer, but it may pardon a crime passionel because murder is committed by somebody who was not a murderer.) You talk about charity as though it were love, and it is true that love will forgive everything because of its utter commitment to the beloved person. But even love violates the integrity of the wrongdoer if it forgives without have been asked to. Is not forgiving without being asked really impertinent, or at least conceited — as though one said: Much as you tried, you could not wrong me; charity has made me invulnerable? The trouble with charity as with the law is that it levels out distinction. And judicial pardon, from this viewpoint, seems to be the point where the law breaks down; the man who receives it is no longer judged solely according to the law.

Of course I am prejudiced, namely against charity. But let me at least make a stand for my prejudices. I was wrong when I said that we forgive for the sake of who did it. I may forgive somebody who betrayed me but I am not going to condone betrayal ueberhaupt. I can forgive somebody without forgiving anything; if I forgive a “thing” then only that I was wronged. But charity indeed forgives ueberhaupt, it forgives betrayal in the person who betrayed — on the ground, to be sure, of human sinfulness and its solidarity with the sinner. I would admit that there is a great temptation to forgive in the spirit of Who am I to judge?, but I’d rather resist it. Humility and conceit are two sides of the same matter, both wrong because the result of self-reflection. Pride, on the other hand, which means here to insist that the power of judgment remains unimpaired, is not undermined by the gnawing doubt of self-reflection about my own potential or actual sins, cannot be destroyed in the act of forgiving because loss of pride and loss of “personality” somehow coincide and forgiving does not aim at the destruction but on the contrary at the restoration of the persons involved and of the relationship between them.

You equate the command of forgiveness with the commands of not resisting evil, of giving, of not thinking of the morrow, etc., that is, of doing good as an activity. I grant you all you say about this — you say it very beautifully –, but does forgiving belong into the same category? I do not know what is more difficult: to demand a coat or to give the cloak also, but I am quite sure that it is more difficult to ask than to give forgiveness. This side of the matter, that is, the mutuality of the whole business, remains outside all considerations in “doing good”, but it is essential for the act of forgiving.

You are entirely right (and I am entirely wrong) in that punishment is a necessary alternative only to judicial pardon. I was thinking of the absurd position of the judges during the Nuremberg trials who were confronted with crimes of such a magnitude that they transcended all possible punishment. But this is surely another matter.

I better stop. I hope you don’t think I am being quarrelsome and, worse, tiresome. But if you do, you will, please, be kind, and forget it.

Thanks ever so much for birthday invitation. I accept with pleasure. I’ll be a bit late (have a dinner engagement before) but long before “carriage” time.

Yours,

[unsigned draft]

DC is a wonderful, wonderful town: I love the Mall and the Capitol Hill district, and the many universities in the area. It’s somewhat bittersweet that Peter Levine is saying a simultaneous farewell to the city as we arrive. Unfortunately, we don’t live in the District proper. We’re just barely living inside the Beltway, though, so I guess I’m officially out of touch with the American People.

I’ll be doing some follow-up work at the Library of Congress, and I may post some results here. I’ve got a great letter from Arendt to Auden on forgiveness and judgment, for instance, that would make a good post tomorrow…. Also, I’ve just picked up Richard Sennet’s new book on The Craftsman. Should be an interesting summer!

There’s a wonderful passage from the beginning of Kierkegaard’s Acts of Love to which I keep returning, detailing the problem with Cartesian doubt when it comes to intersubjectivty: love is a leap and certainty is its antithesis. I also enjoy reading Wendell Barry’s Poetry and Marriage essay, which develops these issues a little further, and especially because it foregrounds the quotidian and domesticated part of loving, the elemental relation, the seasonal return, choice that is not a choice. But the conflict I return to again and again is an as-yet unremarked conflict between Jean-luc Marion and Luce Irigaray. I know Marion primarily from his work on the history of phenomenology, Saturated Phenomena, while my relationship to Irigaray is much more complicated: I’ve been critical of the political aspirations of her work, the attempts to move from a critique of phallogocentrism to constitutional amendments that enshrine her particular account of sexual difference within the law. But for all that I might decry her heterosexism, I can’t deny that I find much that is personally relevant in her work, especially I Love to You.

The conflict between Marion and Irigaray is not too difficult to explain, though of course it is at times couched in fairly dense philosophical jargon: for Irigaray, sexual difference is the primary metaphysical and ontological category, and love is charged with the sheltering and preservation of this gendered alterity, the irreducible Otherness of the sexed Other. For Marion, love is the act of giving oneself to a singularity, whose return of affections makes the world meaningful and whose sex is only evident in the encounters of the flesh in which this gift culminates. Despite this emphasis on the gift, Marion avoids the economic metaphors of reciprocity and calculation, instead rendering an account of loving relation that requires a certain unreasonable risk.

Philosophically I tend to balk at erotic fundamentalists for whom love is the only true path to knowledge, meaning, or justice, but I’m not exactly going to lecture on metaphysics and politics at my wedding. Marion’s efforts to ground eros in the gift really resonates with me; his critiques of Descartes sound an awful lot like Kierkegaard’s, and his lengthy account of the actual practices and development of love seems both more vulnerable and informed than Irigaray’s often repetitive abstraction.

Still, I worry about Marion’s theism, as I worry about Barry’s conservatism, Irigaray’s essentialism, and Kierkegaard’s asceticism and obsession with Regina. And most of all I worry that the project in a marriage vow is not, somehow, to ‘get marrigage right’ by giving a fully informed account of the history of the idea of love and the contemporary debates, but to express something unique to this couple, my relationship with Antoinette and hers to me, which is at the same time recognizable and familiar. To do all that work of expressing idiosyncrasy in a common idiom without invoking controversy or cliché. Like this, only, you know, different.

Perhaps it’s best to ditch the logos and stick to the mythos. It’s possible that we’ll base our vows on the story of Naomi and Ruth:

“Do not make me leave you, for wherever you go, I shall go. Wherever you live, so shall I live. Your people will be my people. And your god will be my god too. Wherever you die, I shall die, and there shall I be buried beside you. Nothing but death will separate us.”

“I decided to study law,” one of his students later recalled, “and came to him to ask advice. ‘I think our society is headed for calamitous events,’ I said, ‘I can’t see the law remaining stable for many years. Of what use would it be to be trained in it?’ ‘ The use,’ he said, ‘ is that you will be one of the ones to remember what it was.’”

It’s not the sixties anymore, but it’s still extraordinary to me that lawyers are able to sustain a link to English fox hunting, millworker’s promises, and the chancery system. The practice of law remains, at least in part, the practice of remembering what law was, of identifying those moments when it changes, and of preserving the continuity and sense of tradition that those legislative interruptions would otherwise efface. Valuable memories indeed.

Synopsis after the jump.
1. Though household incomes have increased over the last thirty-five years, median incomes for males have actually dropped by $800. (Women make less still.) Household incomes have only increased because both partners are working.
2. Household savings have gone from 11% of take-home pay to -0.8%, while the contemporary family has negative savings: revolving debt has risen from 1.4% of annual incomes to 15%. From saving 11% of annual income to indebtedness of 15% of income!
3. However, contemporary households actually spend less on consumer goods than they once did: 35% less on clothing, 18% less on food (including eating out,) 52% less on appliances, 24% less on automotive expenses per car. This revolving debt is not the result of consumer society, despite what everyone would have you believe.
4. Comparing households from 1970 with households in 2006, Warren adjusts for family size by asking questions about the two parent/two child household.
5. Mortgage payments are up 76%: real estate costs are way up, but it’s not really a matter of size. Median home size has gone 5.8 rooms to 6.1 rooms, basically an extra bathroom. However, new construction is aimed at the top 20% of families.
6. Health insurance and health costs are up 74%.
7. Since more families need two cars, the lower per car cost still leads to 52% increases in automotive costs for the two-income household.
8. Child care is up 100%, but that’s just because the average two couple household had no child care costs thirty-five years ago.
9. The median family is paying 25% more taxes than thirty-five years ago.

So: single income families in the 1970s earned less money but had more disposable income. Today, the two-income family spends 3/4 of its annual income on fixed expenses, and spends the 1/4 left on food, clothing, and entertainment. They can’t pare back their spending when financial hardships arise, and if either income is lost through family illness or job loss, the 2006 family can’t pay its fixed costs!

The contemporary middle class (literally media) household works harder, its individuals make less money, it is more brittle, vulnerable to risk. All this volatility spells the coming collapse of the middle class. Bankruptcies are rising, all due to job loss, family illness, or divorce, but people aren’t admitting it. “A middle class where people are falling out and into poverty is a middle class that has less room to bring people up and out of poverty.” Poverty is intractable because the middle class is shrinking, and I think Warren is right to say that our economy is increasingly becoming a two-class society: those who don’t get sick, lose their job, or get divorced, and those who do.

One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather it becomes a destiny when mixed with certain kinds of choices and chances. In The Longterm Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades, Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has shown that Africa’s exceptional poverty is directly linked to the slave trade:

if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.

If Jared Diamond is right, then Africa’s exposure to tropical diseases and the inadequacy of tropical agriculture suggest that investment in public health is the key to Africa’s future healthy and eventual equilibrium with the rest of the world. This thesis is popular among those who see our responsibilities towards Africa in the light of a the duty of assistance, rather than identifying some deeper obligations like recompense or reparation. It also appeals to our sense of pity, rather than invoking the much messier emotions of guilt and responsibility.

If Nunn is right, slave raiding destroyed institutions in the very most developed parts of Africa, shifting local comparative advantages in the continent away from institutionally stable, politically cohesive, and agriculturally rich coastal and agricultural societies towards remote, rugged, and difficult to access societies. Thus, we should invest in the things we destroyed: institutional stability and political cohesion in coastal and agricultural nations. I have independent reasons for supporting the institutional hypothesis, insofar as I suspect that institutions are the best tools for producing legitimate outcomes and that legitimacy has a greater impact on growth and justice than public health or the forms of production. Still, it’s nice to have some confirmation that the worst thing that human beings have ever done to each other is still the same: not genocide, which is a remarkably modern and weird form for our aggressive nihilism to take, but good, old fashioned domination.

Some short pieces derived from Nunn’s work:
Slave trade and African underdevelopment
The Blessing of Bad Geography

The white race is a club, which enrolls certain people at birth, without their consent, and brings them up according to its rules. For the most part the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the costs. When individuals question the rules, the officers are quick to remind them of all they owe to the club, and warn them of the dangers they will face if they leave it.

RACE TRAITOR aims to dissolve the club, to break it apart, to explode it. Some people who sympathize with our aim have asked us how we intend to win over the majority of so-called whites to anti-racism. Others, usually less friendly, have asked if we plan to exterminate physically millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people. Neither of these plans is what we have in mind. The weak point of the club is its need for unanimity. Just as the South, on launching the Civil War, declared that it needed its entire territory and would have it, the white race must have the support of all those it has designated as its constituency, or it ceases to exist.

Tropes of treason and fidelity to whiteness play out in Shannon Sullivan’s book Revealing Whiteness, and I think she effectively addresses the inefficacy of treason given the role race plays in our psychic and social lives, the ways in which every decision to ’shed’ one’s race is deflected by the embodied signs, habits, and privileges of race that simple intentions cannot forgo. If we can’t get to anti-racism through careful attention, thoughtful deliberation, and political will, then John Brown-style insurrections won’t get us there either. That sort of aggression simply reinscribes the validity of the club and the impossibility of ordinary life outside it. Manifestos fail precisely because their words get the blood flowing, encourage us to feel righteous, devoted to a cause, zealous: we skip over the discomfort of confronting our privileges by immediately agreeing to jettison them. The zealot pretends he can be free of his privilege by officially declaiming it, while nonetheless preserving most of what marks him as white. If he engages in violent insurrection, he nonetheless gets better treatment, even in punishment, than non-whites. No, I think Sullivan is right, here: we cannot be rid of privilege, we can only put it to use, undermining itself, analyzing itself, drawing attention to itself. Even if Ignatiev has gone back to leading the revolution against kosher toasters or whatever he’s up to now, I’m glad that there are scholars who are not letting the matter drop.

Aside from the conservative conspiracy theories, there are interesting consequences to the Alinsky connection. Door-to-door mobilization is more effective than house parties, but it’s what we might call derivative power: it saps the communal connections it depends upon to accomplish concrete ends. On the one hand, if you’ve got social capital to spare and the ends are good investments that will bequeath even greater power, this is a good move to make. On the other, if communities are being mobilized in ways that don’t ‘pay off’ in terms of social capital, there’s good reason to reject these moves. That’s where organization comes in: long-term investments in communities pay off in a myriad of ways, but not always quickly enough to win a particular election. One of the most attractive elements of the internet and blogosphere is that it is increasingly a tool for organization rather than mobilization. Internet activism isn’t about mailing lists so much as it is about creating and sustaining online communities.

UPDATE: Obama wrote a chapter in the book After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.