A university student while visiting Gasan asked him: "Have you even read the Christian Bible?"

"No, read it to me," said Gasan.

The student opened the Bible and read from St. Matthew: "And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these...Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."

Gasan said: "Whoever uttered those words I consider and enlightened man."

The student continued reading: "Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh, is shall be opened."

Gasan remarked: "That is excellent. Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.

Not far from Buddhahood

While Seietsu was the master of Engaku in Kamakura he required larger quarters, since those in which he was teaching were overcrowded. Umeza Seibei a merchant of Edo, decided to donate five hundred pieces of gold called ryo toward the construction of a more commodious school. This money he brought to the teacher.

Seisetsu said: "All right. I will take it."

Umezu gave Seisetsu the sack of gold, but he was dissatisfied with the attitude of the teacher. One might live a whole year on three ryo, and the merchant had not even been thanked for five hundred.

"In that sack are five hundred ryo," hinted Umeza.

"You told me that before," replied Seisetsu.

"Even if I am a wealthy merchant, five hundred ryo is a lot of money," said Umezu.

"Do you want me to thank you for it?" asked Seisetsi.

"You ought to," replied Umeza.

"Why should I?" inquired Seisetsu. "The giver should be thankful."

The Giver Should be Thankful

Thought-provoking blog and thread.

I haven't fully thought this stuff through. But a couple of objections: your beliefs you place beyond confirmation or disconfirmation by argument or empirical evidence. Yet you don't grant that immunity to the beliefs of your (our) opponents on the right. You charge them with contradicting the evidence of reality. Seems a bit unfair/pointless if you're in the business of trying to persuade people to adopt your point of view and drop the opposing pt of view. You present your own position as an unreasoned - brainwashed ('I was brought up to see..') .- position. Hardly a recommendation. Presumably there are reasons - moral and self-interested - to adopt that attitude. And if you accept the idea of unreasoned core principles of action like your own, then you have to accept that others might regard their own position on the question of social relations as similarly exempt from criticism. Anyhow, later you actually offer such reasons for your own position: it makes the world a better place.

Also as some seem to suggest in different ways in the thread, it is unhelpful to see your opponents' view as 'superstition', or as 'religious' faith in markets or such. The Godfather of the contemporary right wing view - Nozick - is anything but 'religious' or superstitious, and his view is in any case much more coherent than his counterpart on the left - Rawls. Beyond that I don't think there is any singular doctrinal foundation for the free-markets 'life-as-a-competition' view.

One factor that I find important is the peculiarly American belief in the individual's autonomy: you determine the outcomes of your life, you control your destiny, and outside circumstances count for less. And there are several facets to this idea. One - as mentionned above - is the belief that those who suffer deserve it.

Another is that the only valuable material outcomes for the individual are those he himself or she herself has brought about. I.e. the only outcomes that matter are those that you control and have caused. It is a fundamentally non-materialistic view, and inter alia behind Welfare Reform in the '90s (the problem being seen as their dependency, not their absolute level of welfare). And if you dig even further down into that weltanschauung, you get to the even more basic notion that the 'modern', or 'progressive', view of the consumerist, material welfare as a basis for society was an idea that was psychological unsustainable. (I.e. an offshoot of Nietzschian discomfort with Enlightenment values) Poverty elimination may be laudable as a goal, but it can't be all that society is about, and it can't even be the central concern in society. This is certainly a spiritual idea, but it seems counterproductive - or even a profound misunderstanding - to dismiss it as a 'religious' hokus-pokus.

A third facet to this view is the idea that government-directed redistribution diminishes the autonomy of the members of society in that choice is undermined as taxes replace Charity. The terrain for expressing your Virtue is limited. There is more value to the giving and receiving of charity - a personal relationship - than there is in the paying of taxes and the receiving of benefits, say. The government intervention removes the personal from those actions.

I could go on. And maybe these features strike you as horseshit talkingpoints of the right - the usual lipstick on a pig type stuff. I think you/we need to take these 'beliefs' or views seriously. The right-wing view, no more or less than the left-wing view, is based on reasons, on deep intuitions about how the world works. And though they may be deep-seated, there is nothing that puts their ideas - or ours - beyond the possibilty of changing them through argument, whether it involve empirical evidence of the importance of external circumstances for the individual's outcomes, whether it be how they view government intervention (as an intrusion rather than as an enabler), or the value that is inherent in collective social action (replacing the strictly 'personal' exchange of charity).

Sorry if all this is a bit short-hand. I hope some of it makes sense.

Hey, Doc.  I’m glad you shared all of this with us.  As far as your contention that so many Americans treat the free market as a religion, I can never tell whether they believe it, or just pretend to believe it because a) their peers within their social strata or profession do; b) publicly embrace the concept to justify their quests for profit; or c) they have no freaking idea what it means, and just love the word free, and have been led to think that Democracy = Capitalism, so free has to be good since our natures are meant to be competetive and rugged.  Or something. 

It may be that I found this so appealing because it’s the Christmas season, and I needed to find an antidote for my fear that the Moneychangers are winning so hugely, and the Free Market Monolith (which we often forget is anything but free since the government in fact aids them and their businesses so emphatically) seems poised to swallow many of us wholesale. 

Tom Englehardt posted a piece written by Rebecca Solnit, to whom he seems to have tasked with finding some measure of hope in our current condition; stepping outside the progressive narrative that all is doom.  The piece is long, needs some editing, but she focuses on the other invisible hand, the shadow parallel economic world of kindness and empathy that many of us lavish on each other and even strangers who fall through the gaping holes left by a government system that so aids the rent-seeking capitalists.  She mentions current experiments that seem to indicate that we’re born as empathetic beings, and even as adults most of our brains despise bulling and abuse.  I don’t know that the experiments hold a lot of value or not, but it’s hard not to want to be encouraged by them as a counterargument to greed and self-interest being at the core of our natures.

It’s ironic that I’ve been involved in political activism for more decades than I care to remember, but that at the end of the day I think that only wholesale psycho-spiritual change will make any huge difference in how we change our government’s focus and purpose.  And yet it seems I, like so many of us, have to keep on trying, with some extra urgency these days as our futures look more grim.  One bit excerpted by Edger at docudharma, and his graphic: (Yeah; the hippie in me loves it, but only partially believes it)   ;o)

“Who wouldn't agree that our society is capitalistic, based on competition and selfishness? As it happens, however, huge areas of our lives are also based on gift economies, barter, mutual aid, and giving without hope of return (principles that have little or nothing to do with competition, selfishness, or scarcity economics). Think of the relations between friends, between family members, the activities of volunteers or those who have chosen their vocation on principle rather than for profit.

Think of the acts of those -- from daycare worker to nursing home aide or the editor of TomDispatch.com -- who do more, and do it more passionately, than they are paid to do; think of the armies of the unpaid who are at "work" counterbalancing and cleaning up after the invisible hand and making every effort to loosen its grip on our collective throat. Such acts represent the relations of the great majority of us some of the time and a minority of us all the time. They are, as the two feminist economists who published together as J. K. Gibson-Graham noted, the nine-tenths of the economic iceberg that is below the waterline.

Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp.  How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don't happen, the forests that aren't leveled, the species that don't go extinct, the discriminations that don't occur?

The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid plenty.  The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention.  In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.”   [snip]

The rest of the Solnit piece is here.  Merry Christmas, Doc; and all the rest of you.  ;o)