David Williams's Blog, page 58

The Liability of Corporate Persons

The recent death of a young woman from an overdose in my small community raised that issue to the front of my mind, which meant a recent article from the Washington Post leapt to my attention.

In the article, there was a sobering statistic.  In 2011, there were just over 4,400 overdose deaths from heroin.  Just three years later, there were over 10,000.   That's tough, and a major shift.

But what caught my eye was the datapoint they included after that.  If you count all opioid overdoses...meaning, you include overdoses on the prescription opiates manufactured by Big Pharma...the 2014 death toll rises to 28,000.

More than twice as many Americans overdosed on legal narcotics than on heroin.  Which makes me think.

The focus of the article was the growing trend on the part of law enforcement to accuse those who provide the lethal substance of murder.  If a boyfriend or a wife provides heroin to an overdose victim?  They're accused of murder.

If this is going to be policy, then I wonder how that relates to the corporations that manufacture most of the narcotics in this country.  Because oxycodone is no different from heroin.  Their pharmacology is functionally the same.  They are just as addictive, and just as dangerous.  They are simply legal heroin.  And heroin, when first produced, was legal.  Thanks, Bayer.

Prescription narcotics are also a clear, direct, and profit-driven gateway to heroin.  They create an intense and sustained addiction that is, for the addict, indistinguishable from other opiates.  That addiction, unless very closely managed, compromises the integrity of human beings.  It actively eliminates human freedom, the ability to choose or not choose that is at the essence of our moral nature and our God given liberty.  Once you're hooked, you're significantly compromised.  Only with the most massive of efforts can you break those chains.

So.  If corporations are people, as the law of the land now indicates, perhaps we should run with that.

If you are a person, you have rights.  But if you have rights under the law, you must also be liable under the law.  You cannot have one without the other, claiming the protection of the state without granting the state full authority over your person.

If we have corporations producing a substance that is radically addictive and has a dangerous therapeutic index (the effective dose/lethal dose ratio), then perhaps it is time to consider these organizations as persons.  Meaning, if we'll incarcerate a human person for the crime of providing a lethal overdose, we should also incarcerate the corporate person responsible.

Meaning seizing assets.  Meaning holding C-suite denizens collectively liable as representatives of the corporate person who claims rights under the law.

Persons, after all, are morally accountable.  They have full, not limited, liability.

Let's say it like we mean it.

Glowing Up

I heard the term shared, as my sons talked.

"Glowing up," they said, and so I asked what it meant.  It is, apparently, in the parlance of the younglings these days, the way you describe the transition from the clumsiness of early adolescence into the full flower of young adulthood.  Baby fat falls away.  Braces come off.  Bodies mature.  And you "glow up."  Both of my sons have, certainly.

I remember that transition myself, as I went from a gangly, bony, pasty-fleshed stick of a child to being a gangly, bony, pasty-fleshed stick of a man.

Um...right.  I'm not the best example.  But the principle remains.  Ugly duckling becomes swan.

Glowing up happens.

There's a funny thing, about glowing up.  It doesn't have to stop.

Oh, the "growing" part stops.  And then things sag, and wrinkle, and ache in the morning.  The light of youth wanes.

But the brightness that matters never has to stop building.  The glow never needs to wane.

It can, of course.  We can become hardened and jaded.  We can become angry and bitter, as the mass of old wounds and resentments becomes an armor of scars around our souls.

We can lose our creativity, our joy, our delight in each day, trudging through life in a joyless slog.

Or we can come out of the fiery crucibles of life stronger.  We can embrace the wisdom that has been hard won over decades, deepening our understanding of ourselves and our compassion for others.  We can find deeper contentment in each day, in the simple pleasure of encountering life anew.

Our light can become all the brighter.

Because though youth may have its charms, nothing glows brighter than a well-aged soul.

The Revolution, Incorporated

It's a peculiar flavor combination, or so it seems to my palate.

On the one hand, the American left wing.  The focus of that portion of our nation's political spectrum lately is racial justice and justice for Elgeebeeteecue folk.  The classical understanding of leftism tends to also include a distaste for the profiteering oligarchs of consumer corporatism.  Decadent capitalist swine....

On the other hand, global corporations.  The transnational entities create systems of profit and production that leap across boundaries of legal structure and accountability.  They control both the means of production and the media through which all communications occur.  They have been immensely, triumphantly successful in the era following the collapse of radical socialism and with the globalization of trade.  Their triumph has come with a radical cost, a deep polarization of wealth in the hands of the corporate elite.

These would seem unlikely partners.

And yet, lately, it seems that there's a peculiar synergy between the two, or at least an effort on the part of the latter to co-opt the former.

Like, say, when the CEO of a major tech firm makes a big splash by coming out.  And sure, he's the one who designed and spearheaded the transfer of all production to China to maximize profits and minimize wages.  But gosh and golly, he's so brave!  Wow!  Such a progressive corporation!

Or, say, last year's Confederate Battle Flag hubbub.  Having picked up on a spasm of social-media consensus, major corporations dropped products (t-shirts, memorabilia, the...um...Dukes of Hazzard) with that emblem within a single day of it getting legs.  And then they made sure, through their communications/public relations departments, that the world knew about it.  Such warriors in the battle for racial justice!  Such bold progressives!

Or this year's corporate embrace of transgender rights, as the remarkably stupid "bathroom laws" cause one conglomerate after another to abandon the benighted states of America that have chosen to single out one tiny minority.

Or, say, the corporatization of Pride Parades.

Or the tendency of progressives to glom on to the media narratives of industry, as obviously manufactured "controversies" are used to pitch both products and celebrity culture.  Did you know that a couple of racists on twitter had an issue with there being a black stormtrooper?  Did you know that our latest ad campaign featuring a same sex and/or interracial couple caused a couple of trolls to write mean things in the comments?

See our progressive film!  Buy our progressive clothing!  Fight the power!

On the one hand, corporate responsibility is...um...I guess it's a good thing.  But on the other?

I wonder if, perhaps, this trend is not entirely as pure as the driven snow, or as wondrous as the night sky.

----

And I wonder more, and more deeply, about the commitment of corporate America to LGBTQI/Q+ rights.  It's not so much that I don't share those values, although I'm increasingly troubled by the clumsy and amorphous acronym that defines fairness towards those whose gender identity falls outside of the statistical norm.

Instead, I find myself thinking that perhaps the reason queer-folk politics are so quickly heaved front and center into our national conversation is that they pose no threat whatsoever to the heart of power.  They hold bigotries and biases, sure.  But the tiny minority of individuals who hold economic sway over our culture are not challenged or threatened by gender issues.  Not at all.  So long as you can sell folks things, and keep wealth concentrated?  It matters not at all.

Let's talk about bathrooms, and marriage, and keep progressives and traditionalists at one another.  Let's not talk about globalization and the scrambling desperation of a gig economy.  Let's not talk about the displacement of farmers from the land, or the end of crafts, or the destruction of American industry.  Let's not discuss the way the 'net economy has accelerated wealth being drawn to power.

The Limits of the Gospel

I talked with her face to face a handful of times, not enough to really get to know her.

Through the latticework of interconnection that shapes a town, there were others in our congregation that did know her.  You knew her far better than I did.  But though I reached out to her a couple of times, my interactions were too fleeting, too far removed, abstracted through social media.
I'd sat with her in the social hour, listened to her as she spoke of her life.   She'd come to a bible study, once, and sat there trying to stay awake.  You could feel her lostness, a muted frustration hanging about her like a cloud.  She'd had a kid, then another kid, sweet little ones born into chaos.   She'd struggled to find work, to find her place, to find a path up and out.  That path just never surfaced.
Because between her and the way out there was, evidently, the heroin.  It's a beast of a substance, that narcotic.  Not the worst.  Meth is worse.  But heroin, like all opiates before and after, drains a life, sucks it down into a vortex of synthetic pleasure, supplanting the organic pains of existence with itself.  And then it smothers the joys of life, too, and all feeling, until there is only heroin.
The news of her overdose was not a surprise.  It flitted across my social media consciousness as friends tagged her orphaned Facebook identity, which is how our brave new world tells us of death these days.

What more could have been done?  I do not know.  People who knew her could have had her arrested, I suppose, hard-knocking her into recovery.  But our system of retributive, punitive justice would not have worked for her healing and restoration.  It would have made re-entry hard, and staying clean hard, and everything hard.  Sometimes hard is necessary.  I'm just not sure, though, that it always works to the benefit of a recovering addict.

And what of the church?  What more could we have done?  When she came, she was welcomed.  We talked with her.  We were her friends.  We neither judged nor condemned, and made it clear she could always have a place here.  When she needed direct and material help, it was given.  The door was open.

I suppose we could have gone and banged on her door, been intrusive, pressed up into her life.  We could have heaved her bodily into the healing circle of a 12 step program.

But those programs, like our faith itself, only work if a struggling soul is ready to embrace them.  They cannot be imposed.  They must be chosen.

And those are the limits of the Gospel, the most that we can do.  

The Library

The bible is not a book.

It isn't, it really isn't.  Having spent a nontrivial amount of time with it, having dedicated my life to the study and promulgation of its sacred narrative, I just can't think of it as a book.

Because it isn't.  We get the word from the Greek τὰ βιβλία, or ta biblia, which is the plural for "the books."

It's a collection of books, spanning thousands of years, two evolving languages, and multiple cultures.  It contains histories and poetry, music and legal documents, stories and philosophy and correspondence.  It has been carefully gathered over thousands of years, text added to text, the collection slowly coming together, coalescing around a theme.

The Bible is not a book that God wrote.

The Bible is a library that God curated.

Now, there are some amongst my historical-critical brethren and sistren who might take issue with that.  The process of works coming into canon was overseen by human beings.  It was complex and organic and messy.

It is easy, from academic abstraction, to make the mistake of desacralizing that process.  It was all just politics, one could think.  All just human beings, doing what they do.  And on one level, it was.  Yet I trust within that process that God was at work.   Our sacred library was shaped by souls standing in encounter with their Creator, and wrestling together to shape meaning, finding the outlines of a transformative narrative writ in the sinews between texts.  That is how the Spirit works.

The process by which the Bible came to be was powerfully, profoundly real.

As are all sacred things.  Like the life of a child.  Like laughter.

Pseudonymity and The Apostle Patterson

One of the more challenging things I face as I try to present my historical-critical-mystical perspective on scripture to others is explaining pseudonymous texts.

Only seven of the texts in the bible that are purportedly written by the Apostle Paul, for pointed example, are likely to have been written by him.  The remainder are by individuals writing in his name, who are doing so for a range of different reasons.  It's to convey his theology, or to use his authority to bolster their own, or to give provenance to a message.

But we have trouble with this, in our modern ownership-society sensibilities.  An author is pretending to be someone else?  Piggybacking off of another's name?  It feels like plagiarism.  Like cheating.  Like it's faintly nefarious, a copyright violation.

I try to explain that this was common practice in the ancient world, that it was hardly an unexpected or negative thing.  But folks often still don't buy it.

Then I came across a little bit of pertinent data from our era, more specifically a pungent factoid about the most published author in all of AuthorLand: James Patterson.  Patterson is everywhere.  There's a rack of his books at the local Harris Teeter.  He's the Bestseller di tutto Bestsellers, with over three hundred million sold.

He also doesn't actually write most of his books.

He did, at first.  But when he caught fire, he started subcontracting out his ideas to other writers, who would write "with" him.  Meaning, they start with a general idea Patterson had, and someone else entirely writes a novel based on the outline he gives them.  That's how he can crank out 15 books a year.

Those James Patterson novels may say they're "by" him, but they aren't precisely his.  He's the brand, the franchise, the provenance.  But not, technically speaking, the "author."  Not in the way most people think.  I'm not troubled by that, honestly.  More power to him!

And I wonder, in the way I wonder such things, if that might not be a useful contemporary illustration for how a book can say it's written by Paul, and yet not be written by Paul.

Perhaps we can best contextualize pseudonymous authorship by imagining Paul, the brand.

Paul, the franchise.

Paul, the author...in part...of the bestselling book of all time.  With his name, in all the books, even if he did subcontract out on occasion.

The Moral, The Good, and the Clockwork

It was the strangest moment, in what was something of a peculiar evening.

It was family movie night, adult and older-teen-child edition.

Times have changed since we'd settle in on the sofa with little boys and microwave popcorn, ready to watch some animated Disney output or to giggle over a MST3K episode.  This was different.

Meaning my wife and I took our sons out to a midnight movie at the local art house cinema, where the four of us went to watch A Clockwork Orange.

I realize this might not be standard fare for pastors and their families, but my younger lad's a Kubrick fan and my older son has an appreciation for craft and art, so, well, seeing it on the big screen seemed a must.

It had been decades since I'd seen it, but it's a potent enough film that much of it remained.  It had Kubrick's pacing, careful, slow, and deliberate.  The frustratingly hyperkinetic palette of every modern filmmaker was completely absent, even as the movie explored themes of sexualized brutality.  It felt oddly calm, abstracted from the horrors it presented.

I remembered all of it, but as we left, my wife noted something that hadn't popped for me when I saw it in my youth.

It was the character of the priest, the chaplain in the prison.  He was a little fire and brimstone, perhaps, fiercely presenting his decadent charges with a vision of divine justice.

But in a dark and relentlessly cynical film, he was the only person who seemed to genuinely care about the good.  It matters to him whether the thuggish Alex DeLarge has free will, whether he is given the right to choose good or evil.  When a potent mix of chemicals and aversion-based behavior modification is used to torture Alex into being unable to commit violence, it is the priest who challenges the blunt Skinnerian consequentialism of the method.   Watching Alex abused and unable to respond with his usual gleeful rage, the priest objects to the "success" of his "treatment:"

"He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice"

It was not what I'd expected.  Here, in one of the most deeply cynical works in the history of film, directed by one of the most notoriously cold auteurs to ever sit in a director's chair, a Christian character who is not a cookie-cutter hypocrite.

The priest is, in point of fact, the only one holding up the idea of goodness as a meaningful category.  The priest...in the film as in the book...rejects the whole premise of the world as "clockwork."    He is the only clearly moral character, presented without comment or snark, through Kubrick's coldly dispassionate lens.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young disaffected agnostic, I missed that amidst the cinematography and the ultraviolence.  But now, now that I find myself older and in that role?

It's surprising.  Perhaps even oddly heartening.

Which was not what I'd expected, in watching A Clockwork Orange.

How We Unlearn Liberty

One of the primary goals of public education is to teach citizenship.  In order for our constitutional republic to function, we need to be taught the values underlying a free society.

We need to be literate, historically aware, and capable of grasping our rights, freedoms, and duties as Americans.  It's also a place to begin a sense of vocation, to create art and music, and to explore the joys of human knowledge.  But first and foremost, it should establish our place in culture.

That's the goal.

Yesterday, at the Fairfax County high school both of my sons attend, there was a security sweep.  The students were told it was a drill, but it was not.  Teenagers were herded out of classes, and told to leave all of their bags, backpacks and purses behind.  Teams of officers with drug sniffing dogs were brought in to search their possessions.

Some of the students were singled out for more extensive searches, which were clearly randomized.  Their bags were emptied and their possessions thoroughly examined.

An email was sent to parents, with language about insuring safety.  This is for the good of the children, we were told.  It's about keeping your children safe and maintaining a secure environment.

Perhaps.

It was also a warrantless search, an invasion of individual privacy absent reasonable cause.  There was no specific information about an individual or concern.  It was a general sweep, one that has...as my sons have informed me...been performed in other high schools around Fairfax County.

They're minors, one might argue, just children who need to be protected.  They have no rights, not technically.  Again, perhaps.

For those who are coming into adulthood, this teaches a very different set of values.  They are not incapable of observing and seeing what this means, even if they have not yet been afforded full citizenship.  What do they see?  Values grounded in fear and an obsession with security.

And remember: this is a high school.  For those in the senior class who have turned 18, like my older son, I would suggest that such a search directly violates their rights under the Constitution.  I assume the Fourth Amendment is still taught in Government classes.

A public school is a public space, supported by the public purse to serve the common good.

If our rights as citizens are not valued and lived out there, what does that say?  What does that teach?

The Church Incestuous

Church.

In the Old English, the word for church is Circe.  Or Cirice.  To be healthy spiritually, this peculiar institution needs to have its attention turned outward.

Christianity, after all, is an intentionally pan-cultural movement.  Yes, it's a message that rises from one person in one context.  But it transcends that context, spanning language and culture.  It presses out, wild and joyous, like living fire, touching and transforming and moving on.

It does not destroy.  It lights up, refining and changing and bending towards the just and the good, but it is always ever pressing outward.

Until it doesn't.

When it turns its attention inward, to its own interests, its own power, its own self?  It darkens, and grows broken of soul.

When it turns its affections towards itself, speaking only its own language and relating only to those within the circle it already knows?  It becomes cynical, pointlessly abstracted from reality, turned away from joy and folding inward.

The fruit of that turning inward is warped and flawed, a love that has forgotten the purpose of love, a love that has festered and rotted and turned to poison.

Because, as the Master taught, loving only those who are close to us is not the love that brings God into the world.

Why Robots Shouldn't Sell Books

Yesterday, on something of a whim, I spent fifty bucks to buy a book I already have from a seller who doesn't actually have the book in the first place.

It was the self-published version of my novel, which I used Amazon's Createspace to pitch to friends and family and a couple of folks who'd expressed interest.  It's cheaper than photocopying, way I figure it.  The English Fall has a real publisher now, which is a cool thing, and as soon as went to contract I made it so's you couldn't actually buy the first effort at the book from Amazon.

Which was all well and good.  The novel has benefited from some great, insightful editing, and it's a better story for it.

But what got me was that there were resellers out there claiming to have used copies of the proto-book.  I tracked the sales, and I know with certainty that there aren't more than a couple dozen copies of that novel out in the wild.  Most of those are owned by my parents.

So these resellers were, well, they were most likely lying.  The probability they have it in stock is near zero.   As a business model, buying multiple copies of a book that is sitting at number 7.6 million on the Amazon Bestseller List isn't a recipe for success.

My assumption: they'd set some automated system to claim they have every CreateSpace book in stock.  "Lightly used."  In "good as new" condition.   Then, when an order comes in, they just order it from Amazon, and sell it as used, while skimming a little bit o' shipping and handling.

That, as a business model, seems to have legs.

It also involves couple of little white lies.  "One in stock!"  "Order Soon!"

If the book is out of print, the machine intelligences deal with that by setting the price point higher than they calculate the market will bear.  For a while after I'd shut it down, the price point was in the high hundreds.  Then, of course, the illusion of demand drifted away, and the price drifted down.

Still, the reseller-bots claimed to have it.  So I decided to test my hypothesis, gritted my teeth, and ordered a copy for slightly more than it costs to fill up our van with gas.  "Daily Deals" was offering their imaginary "used" copy for $43 bucks, plus four dollars in shipping and handling.  I ordered it.

Mid-day, I checked back in.  The one other reseller-bot had fallen away, and only "Daily Deals" remained.  Their price for the book they likely do not have and cannot get, though, had gone up to over $200.

By evening, the price had risen further still, to $1,170.

It's supply and demand, and the machine is pricing for zero supply and one demand.  Still lying, of course.

But is it actually lying?  It doesn't know any better.  Reality means nothing to an algorithm.  It just responds as it was designed to respond, unaware, subsentient, unable to change in the face of something unexpected.  It knows nothing of the content of what it's doing, has no sense of aesthetics or purpose.

Which is why, honestly, robots make terrible salesmen.

They just don't know the product.