On the 1st of June I posted an item labeled "another red-letter
day", in response to comments by Norm Kurland. Bill Ryan reacted immediately
to the following statement in my post:
...[A] closed group where the
faithful can gather to lick their wounds and strengthen their case against the
hostile world of non-believing nit-pickers is, in my opinion, a productive way
forward for [binary economists]. It has worked before, to become one of the
great American success stories (although
there was some modification of
the economic policy in the process).
Bill’s request: "What was that?"
In thinking about a reply it became obvious to me that to attempt an
answer in ten words or less would raise more questions and incredulity than it
answered. I have therefore taken the time to compose a contextual answer which
I hope will be useful to some readers.
The parallel came to mind
ironically in the spring of 2001 as I was approaching the Cleveland area for
the COG conference at Kent State University. I was driving west along Lake
Erie and noticed as I passed Painesville and saw Shaker Heights coming up that
I was in historic "backwoods utopias" country. Mentor is another of those
evocative place names, and I saw from my map that if I turned off Interstate
90 there I could follow state road 306 straight down to Kent and avoid the
Cleveland fringe. Immediately on leaving the Interstate I found myself at
Kirtland and in the center of a kind of historical park where two factions are
contending for ownership of sites claimed to be holy--as well as for tourist
attention to their claims for the proper interpretation of a sacred text and
the significance of events connected to its origins. The road continues
through Geauga County, past road signs pointing to other evocative place names
like Warren, Bainbridge, Hiram, Amherst, Orange--evocative, that is, to
persons like me who are familiar with some events associated with those
places.
This district, centered on Geauga County, is the site of an
experiment with broadened and limited ownership of capital that was undertaken
in the early 1830s, long before the Great Lakes states became the industrial
heartland of North America. The experiment was only a distant memory, of
interest to a small circle of scholars, when the Rust Belt emerged in the late
1970s and gave immediacy to programs like that of the Ohio Employee Ownership
Center. It was my interest in that earlier experiment that led me eventually
to consider the Kelso plan for broadened ownership. (A long time in gestation,
however, for although my own interest in ownership spreading was the legacy of
a prairie populist background, well imprinted by the time The Capitalist
Manifesto was published, I did not get round to reading a Kelso tract
until the mid-seventies, when the window was closing on an opportunity to
indulge further exploration.)
The Geauga County region was home to the
first substantial body of believers in the Book of Mormon outside the circle
of Joseph Smith's own extended family and personal acquaintances (in the
Rochester-Finger Lakes region of New York). An entire congregation at Kirtland
was converted by the influence
of their leader who embraced the Book and
the Prophet. Their numbers were sufficient to shift the center of gravity of
Smith disciples, most of whom followed him to his new headquarters in Geauga
County. This was already Shaker country, and several of the new believers had
been experimenting with communal forms of economic organization. Their
questions and example, together with the necessity of providing for the
families coming from New York, elicited revelations from the Prophet on "the
Lord's way" of designing a socioeconomic system. Details of this scheme and
its subsequent
modifications have been described and evaluated many times
before, so I shall mention only the bare bones. (A recent statement by a
seasoned student of the subject is an essay by Dean L. May in America's
Communal Utopias, edited by Donald Pitzer and published by The University
of North Carolina Press in 1997.) Essentially, the scheme called for an
initial leveling as members joined the community, by contributing
("consecrating") all their individual property and then receiving back a
"stewardship" which amounted to a private holding that was recognized by God's
rather than Man's law. The process did not aim for an ambitious degree of
leveling (i.e. an abstract equality as
measured in money terms); it
generally respected the interests and skills of the individual as reflected in
his accumulated property in tools and other assets, leaving in his hands the
essentials for carrying on his productive activities while taking away
resources "surplus" to this requirement so as to provide a basic kit of tools
for another family less well situated. The idea of stewardship was designed to
dilute the concept of absolute property rights by acknowledging that "the
earth is the Lord's and the fullness
thereof" and that the parts of it
possessed by individuals are only a lifetime trust. These assets were placed
in the hands of the steward for his own sustenance, to assist him in caring
for the next generation of God's children and to give him opportunity to
improve the beauty, comfort and general quality of
earth as a fitting
place to receive the Lord at His Second Coming (i.e. to "glorify the earth",
not by magic but by work and skill). Once assigned under the laws of God and
not Man, however, the stewardship was intended to become the basis of a family
"kingdom", to be divided among the heirs of the initial steward. A reasonable
degree of equality was to be maintained by an annual contribution of "surplus"
income and wealth to the community. This necessarily arbitrary quantum was
supposed to reflect the total circumstances of a member, including the numbers
of his children and the need to provide them with inheritances comparable to
those of their peers in other families. Aside from these endowment and
taxation principles, the ideal of heaven on earth accommodated business as
usual in the American way. The sticky point in this concept is not hard to
discern: which members of the community got to make the decisions on how other
peoples' property and profits were to be divided up among the others? The
formula for socioeconomic leveling went through many iterations and
refinements before
settling down to the pattern that prevailed through
most of the twentieth century.
The New York Times reported some census
figures a few months ago which showed that adherents of Mormonism constitute
the fifth largest religious grouping in the United States. Although other
criteria could be used, that one seems sufficient as a mark of
"success".
Now, to justify the recommendation to Norm Kurland in my
"red-letter day" posting I have to show that this success was a consequence
(or at least a sub-sequence) of retreating into the wilderness to escape the
derision and hostility of neighbors who found the content of the Book of
Mormon and the
claims of its of "author" to be a blasphemous fraud. How do
I do that briefly? I assume that readers are familiar at least with the fact
that Joseph Smith and his followers had a history of being unpopular with
their neighbors, whether in New York, Ohio, Missouri or Illinois; furthermore,
that many of them settled the Great Salt Lake Basin just barely in advance of
the overland rush to California in the 1840s, led there by Brigham Young after
the violent death of Smith in Illinois. For the rest, we have to get into the
psychology or state of mind of the early believers.
It has frequently
been observed and acknowledged that the early converts were recruited from the
rural northwestern fringe of the (newly) United States and that they were
generally not a well-educated group. They were literate, however, for the
conversion process focused on the Book and its magical provenance. What then,
was the appeal of the Book? Two main elements, in my opinion. In the first
place, a story that was believable because it "fit" with currents of thought
that were familiar and congenial to the intellectual atmosphere of their time
and place. That is, when they read it, they wanted to believe it was true.
Second, a belligerent, "up yours" attitude that even though we may not have
the polish of the well-educated we are nonetheless right and they are wrong
because we have esoteric knowledge, and God will make a great demonstration
someday to affirm that we are the smart ones and all you others will burn now
and in hell later as well. (I quoted lines of this kind from the Book of
Mormon, without naming the source, to paraphrase postings by binary economists
in this forum many months ago. Norm did not appreciate that paraphrasing of
his position, but the parallels are still unmistakable.) It is the attitude of
people who understand that they have relatively low origins but are
determined, in the American way, to overcome them and indeed to vault
above their neighbors of more privileged status. Of their Zion in the valleys
of the intermountain west the Mormons sang, "though the great and the wise all
thy beauties despise, to the humble and pure thou art dear." "Though the
haughty may smile and the wicked revile....[can't recall the finish]". And
of their militant self-assurance: "We will not retreat, though our numbers may
be few when compared to the opposite host in view, for an unseen power will
aid me and you and prosper the cause of truth. Fear not, though the enemy
deride. Courage; for the Lord is on our side. We will heed not what the wicked
may say; the Lord alone we will obey." (We are the only ones who have a
conduit to what He really wants from humanity.) This is the flavor of many of
the hymns that were shouted in the Mormon Sunday School I
attended as a
child and youth in rural Alberta, and the aggrieved tone of Norm's beleaguered
minority in this forum brought it back with stunning faithfulness to the
memory.
There is another element in the binary economists' repertoire
that is important to my recommendation for their retreat into the wilderness.
That is their suggestion that it takes a special form of enlightenment to
grasp the beauties of their doctrine, a kind of divine grace. It has been
their foxhole as attempts to conquer new ground for their doctrine via
rational argument have routinely been shot down. It is explicit and up-front
in Mormonism, for it was obvious to Joseph Smith himself that to believe his
story required one to suppress a large lump of incredulity. He therefore
informed his auditors that, if successful in swallowing it, they could take
satisfaction in being among the elect who have been given the gift of
comprehension and are therefore qualified to receive even more knowledge
of esoteric secrets to entering the kingdom of heaven. Others can pray for the
divine grace, but if they are unsuccessful or do not even try, they obviously
have no chance of joining the exalted (Mormons scorn being merely
saved).
Missionaries for Lyndon Larouche (in the early 1980s) made the same kind of
appeal for his simplistic explanations of "the truth" about economics. And I
have encountered a similar theme among economics professors who were fanatic
partisans of Milton Friedman's brand of monetarism in the 1970s, as they
chided reluctant colleagues with the rhetorical question, "what's the problem;
too simple for you?"
The critical point here is that human minds seem driven to find
satisfying explanations for complex phenomena. And the simpler and more
comprehensive they are, the more appealing. We have a natural appetite for
simplistic "theories of everything" and that appetite can drive us to dogged
emotional
commitments to our cherished ideas. Unfortunately, however,
simplicity is not the sole criterion of truthfulness, and the utility of ideas
has been found through the experience of millenia to be linked importantly to
truthfulness. It is clear from autobiographical accounts of the young men who
became Joseph Smith's most effective champions that the Book of Mormon struck
them as the true and simple explanation of all that they cared about most
deeply. It resonated with their personal experience and the cultural milieu of
their time and place. The champions of binary economics have manifested the
same personal epiphany in respect of simplistic but very vulnerable ideas
about the relationship of labor and capital in production (inter alia). And
just as Mormons believe that the unpersuaded cannot possibly have read the
Book, so do binary economists assume that critics haven't read
theirs.
The binary economists try to avoid acknowledging the religious
nature of their belief by invoking the idea of "paradigm shift" that was
popularized by Thomas Kuhn's studies in the history and sociology of science.
The analogy does not hold, for the binarians give a simplistic and inaccurate
interpretation of Kuhn's expression. I will not repeat my justification for
this assertion here, for the matter was handled in this forum many months ago
when I explored the subject of effectiveness and efficiency in science
with Richard Stutsman, designated by Norm as his champion in the subject.
Stutsman effectively conceded the point, after steeping himself in readings on
the philosophy of science, but the binary economists have gone blithely
forward as if it had never happened. Such is the quality of their "honest
scholarship". No amount of refutation can override the pleasures of a
cherished belief. Creation Science illustrates the point.
The problem
with simplistic "theories of everything" is, of course, that they are
vulnerable to truth tests when they come up against reality, which seems in
fact to be ineluctably complex. Cherished beliefs therefore require some
crutches to hold them up, and in the world created by technological marvels of
the past two centuries the most critical support for an opinion is that it be
"scientific". In other words, science has become the paradigm of truthfulness.
In the modern era, it is as natural for the defenders of any faith to appeal
to its "scientific" merits as it was blasphemous for Christians to buttress
their faith with reason in the middle ages. It was therefore inevitable that
persons who found the Book of
Mormon compelling would develop what I
characterized a couple of years ago in this forum as "golden bible science" in
noting that the binary economists employ a parallel reasoning process. (The
text may still be available in the archive if one looks at dates between late
March and mid-May of 2001.) The strong conviction that truth would be
manifested and their belief vindicated gave the early Mormons confidence that
pursuit of truth by any and every means could only lead to confirmation of
their position.
Second generation Mormons, the children of converts who
had found the message congenial with their predispositions, necessarily had a
different experience in developing an allegiance to the faith of their
fathers. They were carefully indoctrinated as children, to be sure, but there
was also that belief in vindication by pursuit of truth, whether by revelation
or by reason. The Book proclaimed itself as a witness, and therefore invited
efforts to refute its claim to being the story of Israel in a different
P:romised Land. Mormons consequently did look for evidence of a kind
consistent with scientific truth-testing to buttress their faith and turn back
the scorn of naysayers. This became more important as the desert kingdom
flourished and its leaders accepted the risk of sending some of their best
young men to pursue advanced studies in the universities of the United States
and Europe. Those who came back strong in the faith did make significant
contributions to elevating Mormon society and intellectual life to the peak of
its achievement, which coincided roughly with what is known as the Progressive
Era in U.S. history and lasted through the Great Depression..
It was through this belief in the convergence of reason and revelation that
what I have called "golden bible science" emerged. One part of it is an
inference that if the external context claimed for the Book of Mormon can be
substantiated by investigations of its geographic, archaeological, linguistic,
anthropological implications, or that they can withstand deliberate efforts of
refutation, then all other aspects of Mormon life and institutions are
vindicated as well. That is the appeal to reason. The revelation part is the
assurance, thundered repeatedly in the Book, that a true Christian, son of
Israel, recipient of divine Grace, member of the Elect (add your own parallel
phrase) will be unable to resist recognizing it as the Word of God directed at
him/her, and that to refuse it entails an eternal exclusion from the race of
gods. With this threat as backdrop, the Book urges readers to pray for
revelation that it is true, adding that if confirmation is not forthcoming,
the supplicant can consider himself as at best a perpetual eunuch and servant
of kings (gods) rather than as a master and father of his own kingdom. To sum
up, golden bible science consists of an unnerving threat combined with an
implication that rational as well as super-human grounds can be found for
believing it. This is the tone that resounds between my ears when I read the
whining threats, diatribes and protestations of honest scholarship by the
binary economists. They describe their "paradigm shift" in the same way as
religious believers describe a conversion experience, but then point to Thomas
Kuhn in claiming it as a scientific revolution. The element of magic which
requires some supernatural reinforcement for the skeptical is the idea of
"independent productiveness of capital".
The experience of Mormonism demonstrates (and not for the first time!) that
success in propagating a faith or program of conquest is not contingent on the
appeal to reason; the spurious version I labeled golden bible science serves
as well. Better, in fact. There is a tantalizing appeal to reason in the
Book’s very claim to being a "second witness for Christ" and in the
possibilities the text provides for checking on its veracity. On the other
hand, the message does retain the medieval notion that only unquestioning
faith is acceptable to God: "Nor is faith meritorious to which the human
reason furnishes proof." (Gregory the Great, Muller p. 57). If available
evidence added up to a virtually unassailable demonstration, there would be
less merit in accepting the message, for merit lies in the exercise of faith
in the messenger. Confirmation will be given to those who exercise great
faith–and it will be in the form of personal revelation of a supernatural
kind, not reason or external evidence. (This is explicit in the Book.)
Consistent with this principle, the Mormon Church as an institution makes no
effort to buttress the rational appeal of the Book, even though it does not
lack either the expertise among its members or the material means to mount a
thoroughgoing program of testing on any of the disciplinary fronts suggested
above. It did mount an expedition at the turn of the twentieth century, to
look in Central and South America for the remains of cities mentioned in the
Book, but following that failure the mistake seems not to have been repeated.
Individuals are not discouraged from trying, however, and efforts to justify
the Book as real history are a favorite sport among Mormons with an
intellectual bent. The New York Times reviewed two books within the past year,
by accredited scholars in American universities attempting to make a case for
the Book as authentic ancient record. These are efforts by individuals to
justify their faith in their own eyes and in the eyes of their academic
colleagues, all of whom are presumably committed to the life of reason. It
also helps them to sell books to co-religionists who are looking for the same
kind of vindication for their own commitment to following the leader. For the
bottom line, as noted above, is not belief in a unique set of moral principles
or religious ideas and symbols (the Book is firmly anchored in Judeo-Christian
images and sentiments), but rather belief in the messenger and his militant
program of building and conquest (more precisely, conquest by building).
For as is frequently noted, the Mormon life is still a rigorous one,
demanding effort on the part of all the faithful to participate in building
Zion on the American continent, the glorious kingdom prepared in advance for
the return of Christ as universally acknowledged Creator and King over the
earth and its peoples. This involves not only propagating the faith, but also
hands-on effort to build and beautify. The significance of this attitude may
be sharpened by noting one of the chief distinctions between Mormons and
Jehovah’s Witnesses, often perceived as similar because of their visible
proselytizing activities. The latter believe the earth will be destroyed at
the Second Coming, and that personal skills and education will have no meaning
in a heavenly afterlife. Education is consequently valued only for its
contribution to the individual’s own income and his consequent ability to
assist in spreading the message; learning acquired for any other purpose is a
vanity. (Botting, The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses, U of T
Press, 1984.) In the Mormon view, becoming part of the family of the gods
means acquiring skills and knowledge by effort as well as by divine
transmission of esoteric secrets. (Knowledge is power, and God is the supreme
engineer by virtue of being omniscient; godlike knowledge is acquired in
mundane studies as well as through the esoteric wisdom of the temple.)
Building the heavenly kingdom is a mundane activity (and its key structures
will escape the burning at the Second Coming). It is an activity that requires
coordinated effort, involving organization, hierarchy, and submission to the
chain of command. And that is what golden bible science is really about; it is
a pseudo-intellectual excuse for submitting to the threats of the messenger
who says "follow me to glory or reject me at the price of remaining forever at
the level of the mundane". It was successful in helping Brigham Young and his
associates to build a unique social and economic structure in the U.S. west
that achieved global reach. The organizational form changed over the decades
from the "consecration and stewardship" design in Geauga County to
cooperatives and "united orders" in later 19th century Utah, to the
relaxation of centralized economic structure in favor of individual enterprise
combined with heavy commitment of tithes, offerings and coordinated volunteer
activities. This latter approach became the pattern at the dawn of the
twentieth century and enabled the emergence of the Mormon Corporate
Empire of the twenty-first (Heinerman and Shupe, Beacon Press, 1985).
Through all the stages of transmission there has been a strong commitment to
work, but also to mutual support and social solidarity, fostered by recreation
as well as toil. The Mormon achievement is the fruit of stubbornly believing
the unbelievable, on the grounds of a threat that "if you don’t believe, you
are not among the elect who have the gift" (or as the binarians would have it,
"the shift").
An important part of the parallel between binary economics and golden bible
science is a question of "so what?" If a reader was impressed by the threats
of eternal damnation in the Book of Mormon, what could he do about it? The
unmistakable implication was that he should "follow the prophet". For binary
economics the appealing element is the democratization of credit for the
purchase of ownership shares. The "so what" element involves the notion of
"independent productiveness of capital" and could be modified to "why bother?"
It became very clear through discussion in the COG forum that this idea is the
critical "paradigm shift" expected of supporters in a campaign for
democratized credit. This was so insistent that discussion hardly got to the
point of questioning the financial techniques themselves, and the binary
promoters were never able to show a cogent link between their (mainly
physical) ideas of capital and the policy recommendations. Rodney Shakespeare
finally was driven to the point of saying that the "productiveness" argument
is necessary to get people to believe in the possibility of the financial
techniques. This is hardly the kind of logical connection that one thinks of
as "science".
To provide closure on why the binary economists in the COG forum reminded
me of golden bible scientists, I return to the scene at the exit from
Interstate 90, when I found myself in Kirtland, Ohio. The most prominent and
recognizable feature in the village is a stucco-coated building designated as
the Kirtland Temple. It is arguably the holiest shrine in Mormondom, for it
was here that Joseph Smith received a large number of the revelations that
constitute the core doctrines and organizational principles of the Church.
There are a few other lesser buildings in the near vicinity, some of which are
also designated as historic to Mormonism. Near to the temple is a visitor
information center, and not far away on the opposite hillside is a large
contemporary church building in the architectural style that is familiar to
travelers in Utah. The temple is owned by a church whose founders followed a
different prophet than Brigham Young. After the death of Joseph Smith at an
early age, some of his followers chose to interpret his idea of priesthood
hierarchy as a family matter and anointed his son to be their new prophet and
leader. This group also promotes the Book of Mormon and is the owner of the
temple at Kirtland. In their argument over "what prophet" these two groups
have never appealed to golden bible science, because it was useless in a
family argument between the children of Joseph Smith and their cousins, who
followed Brigham Young. The literature deals exclusively in matters of who
said what to whom about the founder’s intentions, who are the critical
witnesses, what did they say, and what and where are the confirming documents.
In other words, on the most critical issue of faith, which leader to follow,
golden bible science gets no purchase. A moment’s reflection is sufficient to
realize that this conclusion is completely general: No matter how much
evidence were dug up by various forms of scholarly research to validate the
Book as an ancient record, it would have no bearing on the claim of anyone to
the prophetic mantle and the authority to command obedience in the name of
God. Likewise, there appears to be no essential connection between
"independent productiveness of capital" and the Kelso financial techniques.
But just as the Mormon church uses the threatening language of the Book and
its promise of a spiritual "paradigm shift" to "honest seekers after truth",
so do the promoters of Binary Economics insist that anyone who
really reads the book will see the same light that they have. No matter how
often they are unable to answer questions and objections raised by persons who
very clearly have read their book, they continue to maintain that
failure to be persuaded is due to either lack of diligence or, by implication,
stupidity.
Mormonism is a political movement as well as a religious one. Binary
economics is religious as well as political. Its main standard bearers clearly
manifest the instincts and behaviors of demagogues. The example of Mormonism
could give them confidence that it is possible to create a powerful movement
if they retreat into the wilderness and lick the wounds of their intellectual
defeat, with the stubborn insistence that even if wrong, ultimate power will
prove them "right". For the smiles and snickers that Mormons once felt
they had to endure because of their outlandish doctrines is a thing of the
past now that they can brandish money and power. Young professors of sociology
at American universities can now study Mormonism as an established phenomenon
without being seen immediately as defenders of their faith whose emotional
commitment will betray their stance of objectivity with bursts of incoherent
sputtering. But it took generations of cultivation and solid growth to achieve
that level of confidence and self-control. The binary economists are a long
way from that degree of savoir faire, having yet to fully digest the
explanations of why their cherished doctrine does not add up to a
scientific revolution.
Social and political power do not rest on cool and impeccable reason.
But that is no justification for letting demagogues to go unchallenged by
reasonable men.