Some thoughts on Cambodia

Having just returned from four months in Cambodia, I thought I'd jot down my thoughts while they are still fresh in my mind.

1.  Angkor Wat is not doing Cambodia any favors.  Angkor Wat like many wonders of the ancient world, and like much of the U.S. Capitol including the Washington Monument, was likely built by slave labor.  It is physically beautiful but it is also a testament to the power of despotic kings to force people into bondage.  The Khmer people rightly turned away from the Angkor temples following the fall of the Angkor Kingdom -- claiming that the area was haunted by ghosts.

It was the French, in the twentieth century, who rebuilt Angkor Wat temples and revived the myth of Angkorian greatness -- in order to develop a sense of Cambodia nationalism in order to further French colonial aims (Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over).

The Khmer Rouge explicitly stated that their goal was to replicate the greatness of the Angkorian empire.  The forced labor camps of the Khmer Rouge were done in the attempt to replicate the irrigation systems of the Angkorian empire and to squeeze two rice crop out of the land each year instead of one (Angkor supposedly achieved 3 or 4 rice crops a year as a result of their irrigation systems -- but one of the leading theories of the collapse of the Angkorian empire is that the land was rapidly depleted leading to declining crop yields and hunger).  The Khmer Rouge even named the party, "Angkar," to invoke the memories of the Angkorian empire.  Ironically, in many ways the Khmer Rouge succeeded in replicating the Angkorian kingdom -- re-instituting slavery, hunger, and societal collapse.

Now, many Cambodian universities, in the attempt to rebuild Cambodia society after the Khmer Rouge are once again invoking the greatness of Angkor in order to propel the rebuilding of the country. This is just repeating the mistakes of the last 100 years (and the last 1,000 years).

I believe that if Cambodia is ever going to have a peaceful and prosperous future, it needs to call into question the legacy of the Angkorian kingdom and Angkor Wat.

Furthermore, UNESCO has some explaining to do.  Many UNESCO Heritage Sites were originally built by  slave labor.  Yes the sites are often archaeological wonders and they bring badly needed tourism dollars into the country.  But it seems to me that UNESCO also has a responsibility to question the slave labor systems that brought these works into existence in the first place.  In fact, the entrance fees to visit these sites (often paid by wealthy white people from the developed world -- people who benefited from the legacy of slavery) should be viewed as a form of reparations for slavery and should be directed towards social programs to reduce inequality.

2.  I hate to say it, but it seems to me that Buddhism is not doing Cambodia any favors either. Yes, Buddhism was the only institution to provide education throughout the country over much of its history.  Yes, Buddhists  were horribly persecuted by the Khmer Rouge.  Yes, the country needs some sort of moral foundation and Buddhism seems like the most appropriate source of that wisdom.  Yes, Buddhist institutions are doing a wonderful job of providing housing to Pagoda Kids who want to attend university in Phnom Penh today.  Yes many aspects of Buddhist aesthetics and tradition are beautiful.

But Buddhism as an institution is deeply hierarchical and sexist.  It emphasizes rote learning over critical thinking.  And a theology that minimizes the importance of the here and now, teaching that life is just suffering, helps to create the conditions that keep monarchs and despots in power (why protest political conditions or organize to improve public policy if life is always just suffering?).

In fairness, no other religion is doing Cambodia any favors either.

3.  When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution by Elizabeth Becker is a masterpiece.  Understanding Cambodia is like trying to understand a game of chess played across 100 dimensions.  There are only a handful of people in the world who have enough experience in the region, perspective, and skill to tell the story.  I believe that Elizabeth Becker has written one of the greatest political science works of all time.  I highly highly recommend When the War Was Over to anyone who is thinking about traveling to the region or hoping to understand Cambodian society.

4.  Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley is a dreadful book.  Yes, someone needed to write a book about the endemic corruption of the Hun Sen regime.  And that book had to be written by a foreigner, because any Cambodian who wrote such a book would likely be jailed or killed.  But Joel Brinkley's research is woeful, his thinking is a mess, and his writing is sophomoric.  In the acknowledgements at the end, Brinkley actually says that he read twelve books about Cambodia (by contrast a scholar like Elizabeth Becker cites hundreds of books in her research). Moreover, it seems that Brinkley's real goal is to use the on-going culture of corruption in Cambodia in order to excuse U.S. war crimes in the area in the 1960s and 1970s.  I have lots more to say about Cambodia's Curse, perhaps in another post. But for now, suffice it to say that Joel Brinkley is not doing Cambodia any favors.

5.  Studies of Cambodia refugees in the U.S. suggest that as many as 60% to 70% experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  It seems likely that Cambodians still living in Cambodia (particularly older people) experience PTSD at similar or even higher levels.  But here's the thing to understand:  the majority of Cambodians probably were ALREADY experiencing PTSD, even BEFORE the Khmer Rouge came to power.  Five centuries of colonization proceeded by centuries of slavery and despotic monarchs will do that to a people.  The hyper-vigilence of the Khmer Rouge, the paranoia, and the extreme levels of violence of the Khmer Rouge are all what you would expect from people who already had PTSD.  The genocide by the Khmer Rouge surely dramatically increased the number of people suffering from PTSD.  [Evidence for this theory comes from the fact that Lon Nol, no communist, was deeply paranoid and had already begun massacres against ethnic Vietnamese people living in Cambodia as early as 1970. Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over.]

In some respects then, that makes Paulo Freire's work even more important for revolutionary movements.  Any oppressed people is likely experiencing PTSD.  And, as I've written previously,  Freireian pedagogy is really about treating PTSD in the society at large -- as the necessary first step to heal the wounds of colonialism before gaining power. Absent some transformative healing process, an oppressed people gains power only to violate all of its ideals by lashing out in crazy ways characteristic of PTSD.

6.  There appears to be this odd wrinkle to communism in Asia in that Pol Pot, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh are not listed as having any children.  That would be extremely odd given the conditions of the era (war, lack of access to health care including modern birth control) and given that men in those societies were generally expected to have children.  Now perhaps these men did have children and they were just kept a secret (in order to keep them safe).  But if these men indeed did not have children -- that's even more interesting.

It seems to me that children have a humbling effect on people.  Any national leader without children has never experienced the ego-distonic effect of having a little person, who is your own flesh and blood and who you love, absolutely refuse to do what you tell them.  I think children are vital to help soften and temper the excesses of our political leaders.

Communist Revolutionary heroes in Latin America -- Castro, Che, Ortega -- all have children.

7.  One of the biggest barriers to transitional justice -- in Cambodia and in other war scarred regions around the world, is that political leaders in the United States are often unindicted co-conspirators, who should also be on trial.

It is true that the Hun Sen regime is dragging its feet in prosecuting former Khmer Rouge leaders through the ECCC.  The Hun Sen regime's failure to engage in a process of truth and reconciliation is a national disgrace that prevents the country from healing and reaching its full potential.

But it is also true that the U.S. committed genocide in Cambodia prior to the Khmer Rouge.  McNamara and Nixon were both war criminals and should have been prosecuted as such (both men are now dead).  But Henry Kissinger is still alive and is one of history's most notorious mass murderers.  Making matters even more complicated, I believe that the U.S. was right and just to oppose communism in the region. But the carpet bombing of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the Second Indochina War was genocide and should be prosecuted as such.  Again it is a post for another day, but if the world is ever going to move to some sort of standard of international human rights, war criminals from the United States will need to be prosecuted according to the same standards that are used to judge others.

Elizabeth Gilbert on same-sex marriage

I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Gilbert.  I really enjoy her voice on the page and I benefit from watching how she works through problems -- depression in Eat, Pray, Love and her doubts about marriage in Committed. Look, I get the criticisms of her writing (that it can be self indulgent, self absorbed, unaware of the vast privileges she enjoys).  But really that criticism can be leveled against the entire memoir genre for the most part.

I actually think Gilbert is a much better writer than most folks (even her fans) give her credit for.  Gilbert's ability to synthesize and summarize massive amounts of research into just a paragraph or two to set up a scene or a chapter is really quite amazing.  In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert gives the entire history of a town or a particular Buddhist meditation practice in just a few paragraphs to set up the narrative about her experience. Some of those paragraphs must have taken months of research just to get those 10 sentences right -- but she makes it look effortless. Her research into the history of marriage in Committed is equally skillful.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage is a different book than Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert is older, a better writer, and wrestling with a different set of issues this time.  But the book stands on its own quite well and provides an insightful history of marriage and a compelling memoir of a woman wrestling with her doubts about getting married for the second time.

But today I want to quote from a section in chapter 3 of Committed to share her thoughts on same-sex marriage.  I think she makes a compelling, conservative case for gay marriage:

     Anyhow, to be perfectly honest, I find it a bit crazy that social conservatives are fighting so hard against this at all, considering that it's quite a positive thing for society in general when as many intact families as possible live under the estate of matrimony.  And I say this as someone who is -- I think we can all agree by now -- admittedly suspicious of marriage.  Yet it's true.  Legal marriage, because it restrains sexual promiscuity and yokes people to their social obligations, is an essential building block of any orderly community.  I'm not convinced that marriage is always so terrific for every individual within the relationship but that's another question altogether.  There is no doubt -- not even within my rebellious mind -- that in general, matrimony stabilizes the larger social order and is often exceedingly good for children.
     If I were a social conservative then -- that is to say, if I were somebody who cared deeply about social stability, economic prosperity, and sexual monogamy -- I would want as many gay couples as possible to get married.  I would want as many of every kind of couple as possible to get married.  I recognize that conservatives are worried that homosexuals will destroy and corrupt the institution of marriage, but perhaps they should consider the distinct possibility that gay couples are actually poised at this moment in history to save marriage.  Think of it!  Marriage is on the decline everywhere, all across the Western world.  People are getting married later in life, if they're getting married at all, or they are producing children willy-nilly out of wedlock, or (like me) they are approaching the whole institution with ambivalence or even hostility.  We don't trust marriage anymore, many of us straight folk.  We don't get it.  We're not at all convinced that we need it.  We feel as though we can take it or leave it behind forever.  All of which leaves poor old matrimony twisting in the winds of cold modernity.
     But just when it seems like maybe all is lost for marriage, just when matrimony is about to become as evolutionarily expendable as pinkie toes and appendixes, just when it appears that the institutions will wither slowly into obscurity due to a general lack of social interest, in come the gay couples, asking to be included!  Indeed, pleading to be included!  Indeed, fighting with all their might to be included in a custom which may be terrifically beneficial for society as a whole but which many -- like me -- find only suffocating and old-fashioned and irrelevant.
     It might seem ironic that homosexuals -- who have, other the centuries, made an art form out of leading bohemian lives on the outer fringes of society -- want so desperately now to be part of such a mainstream tradition.  Certainly not everyone understands this urge to assimilate, not even within the gay community.  The filmmaker John Waters, for one, says that he always thought the only advantages of being gay were that he didn't have to join the military and he didn't have to get married.  Still, it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as full integrated, socially responsible, family-centered, taxpaying, Little League-coaching, nation-serving, respectably married citizens.  So why not welcome them in? Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic, ne'er-do-well, heterosexual deadbeats like me?  --Elizabeth Gilbert, pages 74 to 76, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. 

The Ascent of Money, part 3, a closer look at the relationship between violence and wealth

This is the last post in my three part series on The Ascent of Money (you can read parts 1 and 2 here).

In this post, I want to return to the question, 'What is the relationship between violence and wealth?' One of the reasons I'm so intrigued by this question is that the relationship between the two seems obvious and yet it is never talked about openly in popular culture, and certainly never talked about in an economics classroom. Indeed it seems to me that the only time we every acknowledge the relationship between violence and wealth is in TV shows like The Sopranos or perhaps a movie featuring the character Jason Bourne. I think it is vital to study this dynamic because as we come to understand the relationship between violence and wealth we can presumably take steps to have less violence in our economy and in our society, correct?

With that in mind, as I read through Niall Ferguson's financial history of the world, I started to write the word "violence" into the margin anytime he mentioned the relationship between violence and wealth. I just want to draw your attention to some of those passages so that we can begin to move to the foreground, some of the underlying dynamics of our economy that deserve closer scrutiny:

"Behind every loan shark, there lurks an implicit threat." --The Ascent of Money, p. 40

It's obvious, but worth noting that the informal banker to most of the world's poor, relies on violence as a business model.

"Prior to the 1390s, it might legitimately be suggested, the Medici were more gangsters than bankers: a small-time clan, notable more for low violence than high finance. Between 1343 and 1360 no fewer than five Medici were sentenced to death for capital crimes." p. 42

Quite literally, modern banking began with mafia families in Italy. Interesting too that Ferguson sees capital crimes as "low violence."

"There were no debtors' prisons in the United State in the early 1800s, at a time when English debtors could end up languishing in jail for years." p. 60

I had forgotten about debtors prisons, but up until fairly recently (1869) the country that gave us the Magna Carta also loved putting poor people in jail.

But here's where things get really interesting:

"'War', declared the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, 'is the father of all things.' It was certainly the father of the bond market. In Pieter van der Heyden's extraordinary engraving, The Battle about Money, piggy banks, money bags, barrels of coins, and treasure chests -- most of them heavily armed with swords, knives and lances -- attack each other in a chaotic free-for-all. The Dutch verses below the engraving say: 'It's all for money and goods, this fighting and quarreling.' But what the inscriptions could equally well have said is: 'This fighting is possible only if you can raise the money to pay for it.' The ability to finance war through a market for government debt was, like so much else in financial history, an invention of the Italian Renaissance." p. 69

"The Battle of Waterloo was the culmination of more than two decades of intermittent conflict between Britain and France. But it was more than a battle between two armies. It was also a contest between rival financial systems: one, the French, which under Napoleon had come to be based on plunder (the taxation of the conquered); the other, the British, based on debt." p. 80

"In many ways, it was true that the bond market was powerful. By the later nineteenth century, countries that defaulted on their debts risked economic sanctions, the imposition of foreign control over their finances and even, in at least five cases, military intervention. It is hard to believe that Gladstone would have ordered the invasion of Egypt in 1882 if the Egyptian government had not threatened to renege on its obligations to European bondholders, himself among them. Bringing an 'emerging market' under the aegis of the British Empire was the surest way to remove political risk from investors' concerns. Even those outside the Empire risked a visit from a gunboat if they defaulted, as Venezuela discovered in 1902, when a joint naval expedition by Britain, Germany and Italy temporarily blockaded the country's ports. The United States was especially energetic (and effective) in protecting bondholders' interests in Central America and the Caribbean." p. 98 [By the way, don't you just love how Ferguson describes international war crimes as "energetic (and effective!) ways of protecting bondholder's interests!"]

So the micro is the macro -- just as the loan shark will kneecap a debtor who is late on a payment, creditor nations will invade and overthrow governments, even democratically elected governments, in order to increase profits.

"As [Jan Pieterszoon] Coen [officer of Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the early seventeenth century] himself put it: 'We cannot make war without trade, nor trade without war. he was ruthless in his treatment of competitors, executing British East India Company officials at Amboyna and effectively wiping out the indigenous Bandanese." p. 134

Far from being an aberration, that theology of domination continues on to this day in U.S. foreign policy. It is also interesting to think about the ways in which creditor nations kneecap debtor nations to get their money back given that China is now the de facto banker to the U.S. -- holding nearly a trillion dollars of our debt.

"Besides cheaper calories, cheaper wood and cheaper wool and cotton, imperial expansion brought other unintended economic benefits, too. It encouraged the development of militarily useful technologies -- clocks, guns, lenses and navigational instruments -- that turned out to have big spin-offs for the development of industrial machinery." p. 285-286.

"The key problem with overseas investment, then as now, is that it is hard for investors in London or New York to see what a foreign government or an overseas manager is up to when they are an ocean or more away. Moreover, most non-Western countries had, until quite recently, highly unreliable legal systems and differing accounting rules. If a foreign trading partner decided to default on its debts, there was little that an investor situated on the other side of the world could do. In the first era of globalization, the solution to this problem was brutally simple but effective: to impose European rule." p. 289

You get the point. Even in a book written by a conservative Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (the Hoover institution -- intentionally named after the worst president in U.S. history), a guy who has a vested interest in obscuring the relationship between wealth and violence, the relationship shows up again and again. You can't talk about the history of money, or the history of finance, or economic history, without also talking about the history of violence and the ways in which violence has been used to enforce contracts and increase profits.

More on that topic in future posts.

The role of fractional reserve banking in propelling the growth of capitalism in Protestant countries

Friends who know me know that I'm a huge fan of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I discuss this book so often in person that I was surprised the other day when I did a search of my blog and discovered that I've never gone into much depth about the book here on the site. So today I want to rap down the basic thesis of The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism and then expand upon Weber's theory using data from Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money. (There is an excellent Wikipedia article on The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism for anyone who is looking for a more complete overview of the book.)

First published as a two-part article in 1904-5, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is one of the cornerstones of the field of sociology. In the book, Weber is trying to figure out why it is that capitalism developed faster in countries that adopted Protestantism while the development of capitalism in Catholic and other non-Protestant countries lagged behind. And what he finds is this:

The central question for a Christian is whether he/she is going to heaven. In Catholicism, for hundreds of years, the path to heaven was very clear -- pay "indulgences" to the church, and your sins are forgiven and when you die, you go to heaven. Indulgences were basically a way for the Catholic Church to tax all of Europe for hundreds of years. But Martin Luther and John Calvin hated the practice of indulgences (and many feudal princes in Germany and other provinces hated them too). Luther and then Calvin argued that God is so great, no human works could possibly be enough to earn his (sic) favor. Rather, everything is predestined, determined ahead of time by God. They argued that those who go to heaven are saved through God's grace alone, not human works (read: indulgences).

Which is fine as far as that goes, but people naturally want to know if they are one of the chosen, one of the elect who will be going to heaven. Weber writes:

"The question, Am I one of the elect? must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests into the background." --The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism, p. 110.

This was no small matter either. Luther argued that only 144,000 people were going to heaven, so there were a limited number of seats on the bus, so to speak. So people started to look around for signs that one is "chosen." And what are the signs? Well according to Luther and Calvin, the chosen are those who dedicate their lives to creating God's will on earth. So the signs are that one works without ceasing -- and here's the kicker -- and one never spends much on the sins of the flesh. Luther and Calvin hated the sensuality of Catholicism, that peasants could get drunk, dance, and have sex with each other on Saturday and then pay their indulgences on Sunday and be forgiven. The mark of Protestantism became those who so ordered their lives so that they NEVER gave in to the sins of the flesh and never spent their earnings on bodily desires. Hence the Protestant Ethic was born.

"On the one hand it is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace... On the other hand, in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means." --The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 111 and 112

"The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system. There was no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin.... [Protestantism] had developed a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status naturae, to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature." p. 117 - 118

"Sebastian Franck struck the central characteristic of this type of religion when he saw the significance of the Reformation in the fact that now every Christian had to be a monk all his life.... By founding its ethic in the doctrine of predestination, Protestantism substituted for the spiritual aristocracy of monks outside of and above the world the spiritual aristocracy of the predestined saints of God within the world." p. 121

Just to be clear, the relentless work ethic of Protestants was not a means to attain salvation but rather a system of self assurance (a method of existential anxiety control if you will) that simply affirmed one had already attained salvation through grace.

But something curious happens when people work extremely hard and rarely spend money. For the first time in human history you have large accumulations of capital. And large accumulation of capital naturally lead to banks (places to store that capital), which then provides the catalyst (and the capital) for the emergence of capitalism in all of the Protestant nations.

The explanatory powers of the theory are so strong that indeed, a whole academic discipline, sociology, emerged in its wake. And the writing in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is both so direct and searing that it has endured as one of the great academic treatises of all time.

And yet, as great as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is, I wonder if there are some additional factors that also help to explain the rise of capitalism in Protestant countries.

In an earlier post, I asked whether in fact, slavery, not Protestantism, was the catalyst for the emergence of capitalism? Indeed Eric Williams makes that point in his book Capitalism & Slavery and Eduardo Galeano builds upon that idea in, Open Veins of Latin America.

But I don't think it's an either/or situation. I think it's a both/and. Protestantism led to the accumulation of capital that developed the bourgeois class that accumulated even more capital that paid for the ships that participated in and profited from the African slave trade that further fueled the growth of capitalism.

After reading The Ascent of Money, I think I may have stumbled upon another important facet of the story: fractional reserve banking. I'll explain:

The early Christian Church and Islam too forbade the lending of money and charging interest. It was called usury and was considered one of the worst possible sins.

"For Christians, lending money at interest was a sin. Usurers, people who lent money at interest, had been excommunicated by the Third Lateran Council in 1179. Even arguing that usury was not a sin had been condemned as heresy by the Council of Vienna in 1311-12. Christian usurers had to make restitution to the Church before they could be buried on hallowed ground." --The Ascent of Money, p. 35

The earliest forms of modern banking began in Italy with the emergence of the powerful Medici family serving as an intermediary between various businesses.

"Of particular importance in the Medici's early business were the bills of exchange (cambium per literas) that had developed in the course of the Middle Ages as a way of financing trade. If one merchant owned another sum that could not be paid in cash until the conclusion of a transaction some months hence, the creditor could draw a bill on the debtor and use the bill as a means of payment in its own right or obtain cash for it at a discount from a banker willing to act as broker. Whereas the charging of interest was condemned as usury by the Church, there was nothing to prevent a shrewd trader making profits on such transactions. That was the essence of the Medici business. There were no checks; instructions were given orally and written in the bank's books. There was no interest; depositors were given discrezione (in proportion to the annual profits of the firm) to compensate them for risking their money. " --The Ascent of Money, p. 43-44

But it wasn't until the Reformation that modern banking and the modern capitalist system really took off. And Martin Luther and John Calvin were key in revising church teachings on lending with interest.

"From 1515 until early 1524, Luther's works indicate that he was completely opposed to lending money at interest. In the second time period, from late 1524 until his death in 1546, while still principally against usury -- especially among Christians -- Luther's writings indicate that he allowed for the practice of lending money at interest, albeit with certain restrictions." --Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of the Differences that Separated the Protestant Reformers, David Jones p. 52

In 1524, just 4 years after surviving the Diet of Worms and excommunication (but not execution) by the Catholic Church, Luther displayed a notable shift in his writing on usury:

"Luther's writings reveal that he tolerated and even suggested guidelines whereby usury may be practiced in the kingdom of this world. These guidelines include a call for itemized collateral, shared risk, and governmental oversight of usurious transactions." -- Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of the Differences that Separated the Protestant Reformers, p. 61

So too, Calvin's views on usury also represented a break from earlier church teachings. In Calvin's letter on usury in 1545 he makes a biblical case that usury might be permitted under certain circumstances:

"Calvin knew there were two Hebrew words translated as “usury.” One, neshek, meant “to bite”; the other, tarbit, meant “to take legitimate increase.” Based on these distinctions, Calvin argued that only “biting” loans were forbidden. Thus, one could lend at interest to business people who would make a profit using the money." -- Norman Jones, Utah State University

As a result of these theological shifts, the modern banking system began to emerge in Protestant countries in Europe.

"It was in Amsterdam, London and Stockholm [all cities that broke from Catholicism during the Reformation] that the next decisive wave of financial innovation occurred, as the forerunners of modern central banks made their first appearance. The seventeenth century saw the foundation of three distinctly novel institutions that, in their different ways, were intended to serve a public as well as a private financial function. The Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank) was set up in 1609 to resolve the practical problems created for merchants by the circulation of multiple currencies in the United Provinces, where there were no fewer than fourteen different mints and copious quantities of foreign coins. By allowing merchants to set up accounts denominated in a standardized currency, the Exchange Bank pioneered the system of checks and direct debits or transfer that we take for granted today. This allowed more and more commercial transactions to take place without the need for the sums involved to materialize in actual coins. One merchant could make a payment to another simply by arranging for his account at the bank to be debited and the counterparty's account to be credited. The limitation on this system was simply that the Exchange Bank maintained something close to a 100 percent ratio between its deposits and its reserves of precious metal and coin....

It was in Stockholm nearly half a century later, with the foundation of the Swedish Riksbank in 1656, that the barrier was broken through. Although it performed the same functions as the Dutch Wisselbank, the Riksbank was also designed to be a Lanebank, meaning that it engaged in lending as well as facilitating commercial payments. By lending amounts in excess of its metallic reserve, it may be said to have pioneered the practice of what would later be known as fractional reserve banking, exploiting the fact that money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers. Since depositors were highly unlikely to ask en masse for their money, only a fraction of their money need to be kept in the Riksbank's reserves at any given time." --The Ascent of Money, p. 48-49

Think about how important fractional reserve banking is to the history of the world. I deposit $100 in a bank that is required to hold 10% reserves. The bank then lends out $90 to a business that spends that $90 on equipment to run their business and make a profit. The seller of that equipment deposits that $90 in a bank that then lends out $81 and so on. In just 3 transactions, the original $100 has been turned into $271 of economic activity.

Basically, while the Catholic countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy) were still thinking that money was metal and building far flung empires to dig the metal ore out of the ground, the Protestant countries of Europe figured out how to make money out of nothing more than trust. And in the end, money based on credit (trust in business relationships) proved to be more resilient than money based on metal. How crazy is that!?

The important point to note here is that, it was not just the Protestant ethic that led to (capital formation which caused) the emergence of modern capitalism. It was also the theological openings by Luther and Calvin to allow usury, to allow lending with interest that sparked the emergence of capitalism in Reformed countries as well. Free from the dictates of the Vatican, the Protestant countries quickly liberalized lending rules in ways that reshaped the balance of power in the world and gave birth to our modern capitalist economy.

Final thought: it's interesting to reflect on how different church doctrines lead to different lending patterns in the economy. Basically, the Catholic ban on usury led to the rise of mafia-style families like the Medici -- informal financial intermediaries who don't charge interest but take a cut of each transaction. By contract, Protestant support for usury can be said to lead to the development of the multinational banks. They both have their problems of course, but it's fascinating to reflect on the role of theology in dictating the direction of the economy.

Update #1: A number of researchers have noted that the ban on charging interest in Islam has impeded the economic growth of the Middle East, leading in part to the millions of young men with limited financial futures (who are then a target for recruitment by radical Islamic organizations). Also I think it's interesting to note that religions that tend to de-emphasize the importance of the physical world and give priority to the spiritual or invisible world, for example Buddhism and Hinduism, both lead to economic structures that are a complete disaster -- basically leaving the society stuck with a stone age economy. Western liberal support for Tibet is always something of a mystery to me given that Tibet was a theocracy with a population left destitute by a theology that paid little attention to the need to improve living standards. The Indian economy has shown remarkable growth in recent years but I would argue that Hinduism is not driving that growth -- rather as the country has become more secular, it has devoted more resources towards economic development (investing heavily in education and infrastructure).

What is money?

[Editors note: Today I am starting what I hope will turn into a series of posts on what exactly it means to "wake up." I hear the words "awake and alive" a lot these days, particularly in Buddhist circles. When Buddhists talk about waking up they are usually referring to a state of non-dualism, everlasting consciousness, free from the ever-changing nature of our physical world. I've never really been able to discover the "awake" state that Buddhists refer to -- and I suspect most Buddhists, even those who claim enlightenment haven't experienced it either (in my experience, most people who claim to be enlightened in this world are not).

Instead, I'm talking about waking up in the political sense -- breaking through the assumptions and noise around us and seeing things as they really are. That's really the purpose of this blog in general but just in the last few weeks I feel like I've been seeing the outlines of what an awake political consciousness might really look like so I hope to begin sketching it here. I'm going to be coming at this question from a bunch of different angles so at first it will seem like my posts are all over the place. But I think over time, these various sketches will come together to paint a clearer picture of things as they are.]

As frequent readers of this blog will know, one of the questions I keep coming back to is, "What is the relationship between violence and wealth?" But I realized recently, that perhaps I have the question phrased incorrectly. Maybe the question is, "What is the relationship between violence and money?" And in order to answer that question, we need to ask, 'well, what exactly is this thing we call money?'

The answer is not as obvious as it may appear. Is money the rectangular piece of paper in my pocket printed by the government? Paper money used to be tied to gold but the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971 and now the value of paper money is not tied to anything tangible. Furthermore, why did we ever treat hunks of metal as money in the first place? Is the demand for jewelry really that high? What about the number staring back at me on the computer screen showing my checking account balance? Are electronic ones and zeros stored in some remote server that most people never see really "money" in the same way that paper or metal is considered money?

To better understand money I read, Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World." Ferguson is a conservative (he's a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution) and he has a bad habit of dropping gratuitous neocon soundbites into the text that have nothing to do with his point. For example he argues that unions suck (page 116 in the hardcover edition); that the fascist military dictator Augusto Pinochet was really a great guy (pages 213-215); and that George Soros is evil (pgs 314-319). I guess that's just how conservatives roll -- they have to throw in their nonsensical applause lines every 50 pages in or so in order to keep their membership card active and get invited to the next conference.

Ferguson's knee jerk attacks on working people are all the more incongruous because he wrote this book during the middle of one of the greatest financial collapses in human history. As he narrates the economic history of the world, a picture emerges of an endless cycle of booms and busts and our era in no different. The long term data presented in The Ascent of Money serves as a pretty profound indictment of the capitalist system and the greed and avarice of bankers and businessmen (occasionally a few women too, but mostly men). But I guess that's why he had to throw in the red meat applause lines for conservatives -- he didn't want his neocon funders and friends to think he had 'gone all Naomi Klein on them' (even though the data in The Ascent of Money really supports Klein's politics more than Ferguson's.)

I would be remiss at this point if I failed to point out just how odious it is to have to read nonsense like this is a book by a major publisher:

To work the mines, the Spaniards at first relied on paying wages to the inhabitants of nearby villages. But conditions were so hard that from the late sixteenth century a system of forced labor (la mita) had to be introduced, whereby men aged between 18 and 50 from the sixteen highland provinces were conscripted for seventeen weeks a year. Mortality among the miners was horrendous, not least because of constant exposure to the mercury fumes generated by the patio process of refinement, whereby ground-up silver ore was trampled into an amalgam with mercury, washed and then heated to burn off the mercury. The air down the mine shafts was (and remains) noxious and miners had to descend seven-hundred-foot shafts on the most primitive of steps, clambering back up after long hours of digging with sacks or ore tied to their backs. (p. 21)

Did you catch that? Ferguson writes that 'The Spanish at first relied on paying wages. But the conditions were so bad (namely most of the miners died) so a system of forced labor HAD TO BE INTRODUCED.' The Spanish enslaved the population and worked them to death in the mines -- but Ferguson writes about it as an economic necessity as if the Spanish HAD NO OTHER CHOICE but to enslave and kill the local population.

Think of all the other ways that a more conscientious person might have written that passage: "But the conditions in the mines were so horrendous that the indigenous population refused to work at any price. Rather than improve conditions in the mine or simply walk away, the Spanish, driven by their lust for wealth and a theology of domination, decided to enslave the local population instead. The resulting forced labor and early death for the indigenous population were acts of genocide that enriched the Spanish crown." It's amazing to me that none of the editors at The Penguin Press bothered to cut out the sentences that make Ferguson look like a corporatist monster. But maybe they just didn't see it because they come from a similar worldview. It really shows the sorry state of conservative thinking that Ferguson is treated as a "serious academic" even though he reflexively sides with capital and against people every single time.

The numerous instances of sloppy, ideologically driven prose are really too bad because the information contained in The Ascent of Money is really quite excellent. Case in point, Ferguson's explanation of "what is money" is very insightful -- perhaps the strongest section in the book:

"What the Spaniards had failed to understand is that the value of precious metal is not absolute. Money is worth only what someone else is willing to give you for it. An increase in its supply will not make a society richer, thought it may enrich the government that monopolizes the production of money. Other things being equal, monetary expansion will merely make prices higher. There was in fact no reason other than historical happenstance that money was for so long equated in the Western mind with metal. In ancient Mesopotamia, beginning around five thousand years ago, people used clay tokens to record transaction involving agricultural produce like barley or wool, or metals such as silver. Rings, blocks or sheets made of silver certainly served as ready money (as did grain), but the clay tablets were just as important, and probably more so. A great many have survived, reminders that when human beings first began to produce written records of their activities they did so not to write history, poetry or philosophy, but to do business." (The Ascent of Money, p. 26 - 27.)

"What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief, event faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honors his checks or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed: on silver, on clay, on paper, on a liquid crystal display. Anything can serve as money, from the cowrie shells of the Maldives to the huge stone discs used on the pacific islands of Yap. And now, it seems, in this electronic age nothing can serve as money too." (p. 29 - 30.)

"It is no coincidence that in English the root of 'credit' is credo, the Latin for 'I believe.'" (p. 30)

"Cursed with an abundance of precious metal, mighty Spain failed to develop a sophisticated banking system relying instead of the merchants of Antwerp for short-term cash advances against future silver deliveries. The idea that money was really about credit, not metal, never quite caught on in Madrid. Indeed, the Spanish crown ended up defaulting on all or part of its debt no fewer than fourteen times between 1557 and 1696. With a track record like that, all the silver in Potosi could not make Spain a secure credit risk. In the modern world, power would go to the bankers, not the bankrupts." (p. 52)

In my next post I'll explore the ways in which fractional reserve banking explains The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism.

Book review: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

George Monbiot's recent blog post about Ernest Becker, which I wrote about (here), caused me to go back to my book shelf and pull out Ernest Becker's book, The Denial of Death. I bought it a couple years ago after seeing it mentioned on Sam Harris' recommended reading list. But I had only made it half way through before getting sidetracked.

Now, having finished it, I've gotta say it's one of the most extraordinary books ever written (some other folks thought so too -- it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974). We live in an age of so much noise including:

• extreme sports and extreme cars and extreme soft drinks;
• lotions and pills and doctors claiming to make us more beautiful;
• hyper aggression as the model for how we are to behave in the workplace;
• shelf after shelf of self-help advice;
• various gurus clamoring for our attention on magazine racks and on TV;
• competing schools of psychology battling it out to capture one-on-one time with us; and
  
• religions and infinite numbers of spin offs of religions all trying to claim they have found the way.

And we're as miserable as ever.

Ernest Becker cuts through all that noise and says, 'look, the reason human beings are such a mess is that we are all freaked out about dying and we all create these ridiculous immortality projects to try to repress our fear of dying. No amount of therapy or advice or repression or distraction is actually going to be able to take that fear away completely. So ultimately, true heroism comes from accepting our ongoing fears of our own mortality and proceeding with our various projects anyway, even in the face of the knowledge that we are all gonna die.'

Of course this will be an alarming thesis to many -- particularly those heavily invested in the repression of their own immortality project. I have experienced an amazing groundedness after reading The Denial of Death. The book enables us to just drop all of the noise. It enables us to see the world as it is -- a place that is terrifying and yet beautiful too. It enables us to drop the false heroism of our shinny immortality projects and embrace the true heroism of proceeding even in the midst of doubt and fear.

Interestingly, Sam Keen does such a great job of summarizing Becker in the foreword to The Denial of Death that I want to quote from Keen first:

Becker's philosophy as it emerges in Denial of Death and Escape from Evil is a braid woven from four strands.

1. The world is terrifying. ...

2. The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. ...

3. Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. ...
Society provides a line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

4. Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles --my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image.

--Sam Keen, foreword, The Denial of Death, p. xii - xiii

In the book itself, Becker masterfully updates psychoanalysis by showing that denial of death, not sexuality per se (as Freud argued), is the prime motivating force behind the repressions that create our culture.

Consciousness of death is the primary repression, not sexuality. As Rank unfolded in book after book, and as Brown has recently again argued, the new perspective on psychoanalysis is that its crucial concept is the repression of death. This is what is creaturely about humanity, this is the repression on which culture is built, a repression unique to the self-conscious animal. Freud saw the curse and dedicated his life to revealing it with all the power at his command. But he ironically missed the precise scientific reasons for the curse. ...

The psychoanalytic literature remained almost silent on the fear of death until the late 1930's and World War II. And the reason was as Rank revealed: how could psychoanalytic therapy scientifically cure the terror of life and death? But it could cure the problems of sex, which it itself posited. (p. 100)

Becker's thesis is summed up clearly and humbly at the conclusion of his book:

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever humanity does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. ...

The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something -- an object or ourselves -- and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force. (p. 284 - 285)

Interestingly, after reading The Denial of Death, I can see where the Landmark Forum sprang from. [Just to be clear, I am NOT recommending that anyone go down that path -- only pointing out what some of the intellectual antecedents to that movement may have been.] The Landmark Forum's message, that life is empty and meaningless -- and that it is empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless, so we may as well go on and create something beautiful in this world -- is congruent with Becker's philosophy. Where they differ is that Becker sees a role for God, a Creator, even Christianity, while the Landmark Forum leans in a more atheistic direction. I leave you with this hilarious video (below), Landmark Forum for Cats.



Update #1. Buddhism, monasticism, Stoicism, abstinence, and the Protestant work ethic all make better sense when seen through the writings of Ernest Becker. Each of these paths provides a theology and a set of practices for repressing the body which is a really just an attempt to deny our humanity in service of repressing our fear of death (no body, no humanity=voilà, nothing to take away, nothing to die). It's fascinating then to see attempts to repress the body in religious settings (repression of sex through Catholicism or repression of the body through work in Protestantism for example). Repression of the body in a religion setting seems like a hedge of sorts, a poker tell that the leaders of said religious order may not be so sure about the existence of god themselves (because it would seem that the primary motivation for wanting to repress the fear of death is that one is not 100% sure god has it covered). And it actually suggests that the true function of religion may not be to introduce us to God at all (a short hike in nature does a better job of that anyway). Rather the true function of religion may simply be to provide tools for repressing our fear of death -- and the handiest tool laying around, apparently, is repressing the body. That would make sense from the perspective of evolutionary psychology -- those who best utilize religious practices for blocking out the fear of death probably invest the most energy in immortality projects (homes, careers, winning wars, building families, etc.).

some thoughts on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, part 2

So I want to take one more pass through the political theorem that I laid out in my last post on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This is a slight modification on what I posted earlier, but I think this is where I really wanted to go with it. I think both posts have something valuable to say, but this one also benefits from being more compact and builds nicely upon an earlier post I wrote on trauma. Okay here goes:

1. Oppressed people are not oppressed by accident or oppressed in some abstract sense. They are oppressed through actual violence in the first instance (the Conquest, Colonization, or Middle Passage) and later through a combination of physical and symbolic violence that becomes internalized. [Examples of on-going physical violence -- lynchings, police brutality, structural unemployment, punitive welfare "reform," NAFTA, crumbling schools, and high incarceration rates for minor drug offenses; Examples of on-going symbolic violence -- racist cultural media products including anything from Charles Murray, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, etc.; Examples of internalized violence -- depression, addiction, gangs, domestic violence, despair, inaction, cynicism, passivity.]

2. The initial violence causes PTSD in both conqueror and conquered. So of course oppressed people are messed up. And the dysfunction of the initial PTSD is then passed on down to subsequent generations of both oppressed and oppressors (because up until recently, there was no effective treatment for PTSD).

[This is where traditional Marxist analysis totally misses the boat. Marxists analysis too often portrays oppressed people in a retro-romantic way -- as perfect, innocent, well-intentioned folks who could lead the world to peace and prosperity if only the oppressors would stop oppressing them. What that analysis misses is the tremendous dysfunction that is built into every oppressed community as a result of the trauma of the initial oppression (and just built into the fact that human beings are flawed, fallible creatures).

This is not a small point either. Oppressors know about the dysfunction and pathologies in oppressed communities (often because they caused them and continue to benefit from them). And oppressors go to great lengths to point out this dysfunction as justification for why poor people cannot be permitted to gain power. I think we dismantle these critiques by saying that PTSD-like symptoms appear in both oppressor and oppressed communities because the initial violence was an attempt to destroy the humanity of oppressed people -- and ended up dehumanizing both oppressor and oppressed alike.]

3. In order to liberate themselves from oppression, oppressed people need to heal from the initial PTSD and its subsequent impact on individuals, families, and communities of oppressed people across the generations.

4. The way any oppressed people begin to heal from PTSD is through movement, through conversation, through shaking, through roaring, through completing the act of escape, through coming back into their bodies and realizing they are not just object but Subject. And that's really where Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed comes in. It is not only a tool for liberation, unwittingly it is also a tool for healing collective historical PTSD.

5. And that is precisely why white America (and really all oppressors) try to prevent step #4 from happening. Through an elaborate system of cultural messages about what is "proper" and ongoing institutional violence to reinforce that message ('don't talk back, know your place, don't show emotion, for gawd sake don't show anger ever, always show deference -- or you will be unemployed, broke, tazed, jailed, homeless, or killed'), white America tries to suppress any signs, signals, or steps that might lead to a collective shaking off of the trauma of the past. They try to short-circuit this last healing step in oppressed communities because as long as they can prevent it from being completed, they stay in power.

Some thoughts on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, part 1

I just reread Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and was impressed by how relevant it remains now -- nearly 40 years after it was first published. I was reading the 30th Anniversary Edition and it is actually better than the original because it has now been revised to reflect inclusive language (the tiresome term "man" as a reference to all of humankind has mercifully been replaced by "humanity" or "men and women").

I confess when I first read the book as a 19 year old, much of it was over my head. Even though Freire's genius stems from his insistence on starting with the concrete before moving to the abstract (traditional education usually gets this backwards much to the detriment of students) this is a book of pure pedagogical theory. But now that I've worked in various movements for social change for many years, the words and ideas in Pedagogy of the Oppressed leap off the page and ring true like never before.

One of the things that blew me away about the book is that Freire spends the entire first chapter discussing the phenomenon in which oppressed people often resist their own liberation. This is one of the hardest things and yet also one of the most important things to understand about liberation movements. When the movement begins, the very people who stand the most to gain from the movement will often oppose their own liberation.

This is counter-intuitive to the extreme. If someone has a boot on his/her neck you would think that removing that boot would bring relief and that those who fight to remove the boot would be greeted as heroes. But that is not the case because the oppressed person, in order to feel some sort of control over his/her own life has usually internalized the oppression initially directed from the outside, and because the oppressed person also knows that any oppressor who is willing to use the boot is also willing to extinguish the oppressed person as well -- so the boot then comes to be seen as the better alternative. Frantz Fanon discovered this by studying the anti-colonial movement in Algeria in the 1950s and wrote a whole book about the phenomenon called, The Wretched of the Earth. In many ways then Pedagogy of the Oppressed functions as a sequel to Wretched of the Earth posing the same problem, but answering the question, "so what do we do about it?"

I want to quote extensively from the first chapter of the book and urge you to run out and buy the book or re-read the old tattered copy you have up on your shelf somewhere. It really is as relevant today as ever.

In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. (p. 44)

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or "sub-oppressors." ... This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor.
(p. 45)

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. (p. 47)

However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor, but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression. (p. 47)

They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produce by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom. (p. 48)

In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their own liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. (p. 49)

If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these "beings for another." (p. 49)

Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.
(p. 56)

Analysis of existential situations of oppression reveals that their inception lay in an act of violence--initiated by those with power. This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate. (p. 58)

The more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate "things." This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to "in-animate" everything and everyone it encounters, in it eagerness to possess, unquestionable corresponds with a tendency to sadism. (p. 59)

Under the sway of magic and myth, the oppressed (especially the peasants, who are almost submerged in nature) see their suffering, the fruit of exploitation, as the will of God--as if God were the creator of this "organized disorder." (p. 61-62)

As a certain point in their existential experience the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction towards the oppressors and their way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors, to imitate them, to follow them. (p. 62)

The oppressed have been destroyed precisely because their situation has reduced them to things. In order to regain their humanity they must cease to be things and fight as men and women. This is a radical requirement. They cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become human beings. (p. 68)

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. (p. 69)

So all of this got me thinking about how how language and culture work in American society to perpetuate oppression today. Without realizing it, our minds have been colonized by the ideology of oppression, and as Freire points out, it is extremely difficult to break out of it. So here is how I think it works in the U.S. (and even around the world) now:

1. Oppressed people are not oppressed by accident or oppressed in some abstract sense. They are oppressed through actual violence in the first instance (the Conquest, Colonization, or Middle Passage) and later through a combination of physical and symbolic violence that becomes internalized.

2. In order to break out of oppression, oppressed people have to realize that they are oppressed and begin to dismantle the oppressive structures in their own minds as a first step toward making the commitment to transforming the reality around them.

3. [This is where it gets fascinating:] The first signs of the transformation of consciousness, I believe consist of 1.) anger upon recognizing the system of oppression; and 2.) any display that the oppressor no longer gets to make the rules.

Which is why American culture tries to squash any sign of anger, independence, or collective consciousness in oppressed peoples (African Americans mainly but also any person of color, women, and youth).

The Republican Party spent most of their advertising dollars in 2008 trying to convince America that Michelle Obama was an "angry black woman" and then, when that didn't work, they doubled down and tried to argue that Barack Obama was "an angry black man." That's what the whole Rev. Wright thing was about and why that 2 second "god damn America" clip got played several thousand times during the campaign. Every single commentator on Fox News has called Barack Obama an "angry black man." Those code words are intentional. "Angry black man" is a dog whistle to tell white America to go get their pitch forks to suppress the attempt by African Americans to achieve any sort of liberation consciousness. Historically, if Africans Americans in the United States displayed any sign of anger or unwillingness to express deference to white people, they were lynched. White America has always used violence to reinforce the cultural conditioning that keeps them in a position of privilege.

Why the hell do you think we invaded Grenada? Because the Reagan administration could not permit a black former slave colony from becoming a socialist paradise. The Reagan Administration knew that if African Americans in U.S. cities could look to the south and see a successful black socialist nation that it would radically change the political dynamics here in the U.S. The pictures of rich white American medical school students kissing the tarmac upon returning home was symbolic in more ways than one. They had been rescued from their overpriced med school in Grenada and their white privilege was still there waiting for them when they returning home.

Why does white America freak the fuck out anytime an African American player in the NBA or NFL wants to wear a dew rag or corn rows? Allen Iverson is about 3 feet tall and over the last decade has been one of the most successful players in the history of the NBA. But he's never gotten the endorsement deals like Jordan or Tiger. Why? Because he wears corn rows and hip hop fashion -- and that shows that he does not accept the conditions and rules set down by the oppressor culture. White sponsors simply will not permit that "bad attitude" (code words to tell people to ostracize those oppressed people who fail to display deference). God forbid Iverson ever gets angry about playing time -- even after making the All Star team ten times, every sports commentator on TV instantly rushes to the mic to tusk tusk and explain in various coded phrases that Iverson needs to learn his place. Iverson makes his own rules because he is confident in his own proven abilities. White America cringes and tries to force him to STFU because his independence shows that he is breaking free from the cultural mindset imposed by the oppressor.

What is more, there are a whole series of words that no one is permitted to say in polite society in the U.S. without risking instantly ending the debate and being excluded from further conversations. Those words include:

• nationalize
• class
• reparations
• redistribution
• Marx
• any mention of any strategy other than MLK-style nonviolence by progressive.

The common thread among all those words is that they each reveal a burgeoning consciousness and a crumbling of the oppressor mindset that tells us that all policy must be devoted to protecting the rights of capital.

So anyway, if you've read this far, thank you. And please go out read or re-read Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. The life you liberate may be your own.

Update #1. Freire, near the end of the preface to Pedagogy of the Oppressed writes:

From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love. (p. 40)

It's a fascinating thing to write. His book is about educational theory. But at the end of the day, for Freire, education, revolution, and liberation are really in service of creating a world in which it will be easier to love. I think he has summed it up perfectly. That is the revolutionary project. A society built on systems of domination, distorts and impedes love. As we dismantle systems of domination, we create space for a world in which it will be easier to love.

Update #2: There is so much to say about Pedagogy of the Oppressed that I wrote a part 2 to this post which you can read (here).