The weekend edition of the Business Times featured an interesting conversation with the economist Roger Bootle. Interesting because the Business Times is ... well, a newspaper about business and the economy although on weekends it deigns to feature selected restaurant reviews (usually expensive) and articles on fashion (also usually expensive).
This article was unusual because Bootle seems to be arguing against some of the fundamental premises of capitalism and economics - that is that society is best served when self interested individuals make rational decisions based on that self interest. His line of thought began when he went from a meeting discussing the outlandish bonuses to be paid out to the hospital where his wife was about to give birth. The juxtaposition between the remuneration of the midwife, who'd held his wife and child's lives in her hands and the work and remuneration that the fat cat City bankers were about receive struck him as being very very strange and a signal that there was something wrong with the financial world.
The reason I got so interested in the interview is because he's doing something I wish people would do more - that is - question the key premises and assumptions of economics. In some of the excerpts from the interview below, Bootle discusses how some of the basic assumptions of economics contradict the entire field of psychology and sociology.
Think about it - as a Christian - what does it mean when the entire field of economics is based on the premise of self interested individuals acting rationally? How does it square with the Christian faith? Shouldn't it at least raise some questions - or doubts - in our minds as to whether such a system could possibly coexist comfortably with Christian ethics and morality?
Where is the dying to self - so critical to the Christian walk - when your entire world is premised on one acting in a self interested and 'rational' manner? Could it be that the field of economics itself with all its underlying assumptions about human behaviour is antithetical to christian values and mores? Adding on to that thought - given that our world is now run by giant MNCs and governed by huge interlocking economic and financial systems - could it also be that in the process, it somehow undermines our humanity?
Bootle comes close to this conclusion when at the end of the interview, he talks about the need for recovering a sense of public purpose. He asserts that the older bankers in London had a sense that they were contributing to the society at large, that "the financial activity was there in order to achieve some purpose outside the financial world".
Link to the full interview is here. Extracts below.
"'So then I jumped on the train, went to the hospital where my wife was due to give birth later that day, and suddenly, amidst all these, I came across this nice midwife who was extremely helpful and dedicated. And the contrast struck me very strongly because what she was doing was extremely important in some human sense, and there was a woman who was completely in her hands, namely my wife giving birth to a child, and of course there was a child. What could be more joyful than that?
'And of course she was earning a mere fraction of what people in the City were earning. I got interested in this business of motivation, because I thought to myself, if you're a midwife, obviously it'd be quite nice if someone came along and gave you a big bonus, but what actually motivated you, where did you get your satisfaction from? At the end of the day when you went home, did you think to yourself, you know, I've earned another couple of thousands of pounds today. I thought the answer was no, and it really alerted me to questions of motivation, purpose and reward, and I came to think then that there's something profoundly sick about the financial markets"
"While some bankers profess to be doing God's work, Mr Bootle declares that much of the activity in financial markets 'achieve no good for society at all and, in some cases, may actually harm it'. Obviously, financial activity has its place and worth, but 'if you look, for instance, at the sheer volume of trading that's done in shares by institutional shareholders, who are supposedly acting in the interests of their members, you have to ask yourself whether that actually achieves a great deal', he says.
And one fundamental assumption of economics and economic accounting is that 'if transactions take place between freely consenting adults in a market environment where people aren't being compelled to do something, then the activity must be generating human welfare', he points out. 'And I've come to believe, more and more, that as far as the financial sector is concerned, that's simply not true; a lot of what's going on is just moving stuff from one place to another, one pocket to another.'
But society is obsessed by the business of measurability: 'If it's measured and it's called GDP, then we tend to assume it will be good, and so society is devoted to increasing this thing called GDP but that may not actually have that much connection with fundamental human wellbeing.'
Likewise, basic financial market theory assumes or asserts that if a new market springs up and trading takes place, something 'good' is taking place as the activity is meeting some market need.
'But what I think is becoming increasingly obvious is sometimes new markets emerge, so there is something that's traded, and because it's traded, then other people have to monitor what's happening to the price. Because the price is changing, then other people - mainly executives and companies - get concerned about what's happening to the market price, which makes the need for activity......
That said, economics is simply 'a very, very funny subject, very odd indeed', he declares. 'It's psychologically extremely weak. You've got, after all, a whole academic subject called psychology which is all about human motivations, how humans behave in groups, a huge subject and with practical issues on how to deal with people. Then you've got another academic subject called economics that basically says that human beings are quite simple - they're interested (only) in themselves and they just want more and more of this thing called enjoyment or well-being or money or utility, whatever, and they're like a machine, and they just do and do, and of course they're rational in the process of all these.
'It's very odd, really. It's almost like the insides of that other academic subject are just worthless, just thrown away! And now, economists are realising what behavioural finance is all about - the psychological dimension to human beings. Related to that is also the issue of groups. Economists and economics don't really have an understanding about groups - the only concession economists make to groups is they recognise they exist but assume they behave just like individuals and firms. In the process, of course, they're throwing away another academic discipline called sociology!'
"He adds: 'I think we need a system which quite consciously has a sense of public purpose. I've talked quite a lot to older bankers - you want to talk to them, get their wisdom before they die - and what these people tell you is they had a sense of purpose in the organisation, the sense that the organisations were doing something for the benefit of society.
'If you talk to older merchant bankers in London, for instance, people who worked in London before the Americanisation of the city, again, they had more of a sense of purpose - that the justification for what they were doing was something outside the world of finance. The financial activity was there in order to achieve some purpose outside the financial world. It was that that gave justification to what they did, it was from that they derived their pride and self-respect, whereas we've moved into a system where people derived pride and self-respect from their bonuses"
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Love goes toward love
Found this post on outfits inspired by Shakespeare :) Girliness AND nerdiness are compatible after all!
Link is here.
*
Yes yes, I'm incorrigible - I really do like Romeo and Juliet. Yes I KNOW its the most over quoted and trite play there is - but just listen to some of these lines!
*
R:
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
J:
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
R:
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
J:
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
R:
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
J:
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
R:
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
J:
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
R:
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.
Monday, April 19, 2010
To do list - find some colour
Cupcake photo is from here :)
*
What ho! Thunder and lightning raging about outside my window, angry volcano in Iceland and 'civil strife' in Thailand - this calls for this thoroughly appropriate extract from Julius Caesar (see below). I've always liked the rhythm of the polysyndeton: "and I have seen/The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam/To be exalted with the threatening clouds".
Are you not moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing infirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,
To be exalted with the threatening clouds;
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.
-- Julius Caesar
Act I Sc III
*
Shakespeare's good for every season - the ides of March are past and now, the darling buds of May? :)
Friday, April 16, 2010
Two Poems: let down your hair
The concept of grouping poems with a shared theme or metaphor in order to better reflect on the different ways poets treat/use the same theme has fascinated me since my high school days - I loved it whenever we got to do a contrast/compare exercise for practical criticism class. So sometime last year, I began posting pairs of poems on my FB notes page - mostly revolving around themes of food and culture for food loving bibliophiliac friends. There was the cheese poem, the WCW plums poem and the pair on greek food/mythology.
Concurrently, I also posted a series on this blog on the representation of the seasons in poetry and I wroteabout the way seasons have come to embody mood, themes of death and rebirth in western art,music and literature. The second poem below, is one of the ones I came across during that time; I liked it but wound up not posting because, well, next to the powerfully written Wallace Stevens one - this one seemed to fade.
I kept the poem anyway - there was just something so intimate and evocative about the protagonist's observations on his lover's hair.
So I sat on it until last month, I opened an anthology of poetry and came across the Li Young Lee one and loved it. I read it over and over again running the different strands of thought through my fingers and luxuriating in the cadences of it and in the way the alliterative hiss of the 'h' sounds brought to the reader's ear the 'music of comb'. Yes, this was love but not the callow love of youth but a love that has lasted 'half a hundred years', a quiet unexpressive mellow love.
The two poems circle around the same theme of sensual love but do it by honing in on the small details of light, colour and daily life - showing that where love is present - even the daily ritual of hair combing is imbued with a certain beatific light.
The culture we live in today prizes youth and the way love is portrayed in most popular films and fiction is the brash red-hot love of youth, easily given over to rash deeds and words - just think Romeo and Juliet.
It's comparatively rare to see graceful portrayals of love grown old and gentle - Up (the Pixar movie) was a surprise precisely because in the first ten minutes of the film, the main characters meet, fall in love and grow old together. It was gracefully done and one of the ways the film makers showed the passing of time and their aging, was to have her hair change - step by step - from a child's short flippy brown bob, to long and wavy - a young woman's hair - then finally, grey and coiled into a neat bun.
Her hair changed but their love didn't and it was beautiful in this age of quick and easy no fault divorces, to watch their lives intertwine and their commitment to each other even in the face of hard times. They faced money problems, fertility issues, the narrowing of options in life - all the problems that beset modern marriages, in short and they faced it together.
So it is in the Li Young Lee poem, where his father watches his mother comb her hair - and even though it is not explicitly said - their love is as glimmeringly clear as silver strands in a waterfall of black hair.
*
Early in the morning
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers,pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily,like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.
-- Li Young Lee
*
The Snow Is Deep on the Ground
The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.
Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.
The snow is beautiful on the ground.
And always the lights of heaven glow
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
–Kenneth Patchen
Concurrently, I also posted a series on this blog on the representation of the seasons in poetry and I wroteabout the way seasons have come to embody mood, themes of death and rebirth in western art,music and literature. The second poem below, is one of the ones I came across during that time; I liked it but wound up not posting because, well, next to the powerfully written Wallace Stevens one - this one seemed to fade.
I kept the poem anyway - there was just something so intimate and evocative about the protagonist's observations on his lover's hair.
So I sat on it until last month, I opened an anthology of poetry and came across the Li Young Lee one and loved it. I read it over and over again running the different strands of thought through my fingers and luxuriating in the cadences of it and in the way the alliterative hiss of the 'h' sounds brought to the reader's ear the 'music of comb'. Yes, this was love but not the callow love of youth but a love that has lasted 'half a hundred years', a quiet unexpressive mellow love.
The two poems circle around the same theme of sensual love but do it by honing in on the small details of light, colour and daily life - showing that where love is present - even the daily ritual of hair combing is imbued with a certain beatific light.
The culture we live in today prizes youth and the way love is portrayed in most popular films and fiction is the brash red-hot love of youth, easily given over to rash deeds and words - just think Romeo and Juliet.
It's comparatively rare to see graceful portrayals of love grown old and gentle - Up (the Pixar movie) was a surprise precisely because in the first ten minutes of the film, the main characters meet, fall in love and grow old together. It was gracefully done and one of the ways the film makers showed the passing of time and their aging, was to have her hair change - step by step - from a child's short flippy brown bob, to long and wavy - a young woman's hair - then finally, grey and coiled into a neat bun.
Her hair changed but their love didn't and it was beautiful in this age of quick and easy no fault divorces, to watch their lives intertwine and their commitment to each other even in the face of hard times. They faced money problems, fertility issues, the narrowing of options in life - all the problems that beset modern marriages, in short and they faced it together.
So it is in the Li Young Lee poem, where his father watches his mother comb her hair - and even though it is not explicitly said - their love is as glimmeringly clear as silver strands in a waterfall of black hair.
*
Early in the morning
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers,pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily,like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.
-- Li Young Lee
*
The Snow Is Deep on the Ground
The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.
Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.
The snow is beautiful on the ground.
And always the lights of heaven glow
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
–Kenneth Patchen
Friday, April 9, 2010
Come fly with me
Is it possible to miss air? Not even food or people or things but pure simple air?
Singapore is scented with the dust of the construction sites or hazy with the fumes from exhausted cars (couldn't resist that one - sorry!) or - horrors!- the salt smell isn't the sea but the sweat of the person squished up next to me on the train.
I'm suffering from a case of city fatigue and scanning my friend's pictures from his recent trip down under didn't help. Oh that album was lovely, the littoral scenes, green purples of lavender stretching as far as the eye could see, faces pink with cold and good clean air.
But you must be thinking, air can't really be captured in a photo - or can it?
Maybe it can. You can see crisp cold wind ruffling hair, infer the clean scent of lavender scented fields, the salt tang of the ocean. Your body pricks up and yearns toward the clean rush of sweetness.
Or maybe you just know - like when you see strawberries and lavender - that the air will be filled with the scent of longing. That air, light, colour and memories are inseparable elements.
Come with me. Let's take a plane ride then rent a car and drive drive drive until to lavender farms and wide blue skies.
I know its been a good week. Watched a play, read a little, was productive at work, ate great burgers for lunch. Oh and there's the first birthday party of one special little girl who showed up sometime last year all red and pouty :)
No disasters happened. The world spun on, creaking a little at times but on the whole, moving along at a decent pace.
But air? You know, it's just kind of necessary.
So yes, people, I really am that kind of a silly nut.
I just miss air.
So come fly with me and we'll go find ourselves a really sweet spot under a tree.
And breathe clean fresh eucalyptus scented acerbically cool air.
*
"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."
- C.S. Lewis
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Easter Sunday 2010
I got baptized today.
*
In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
1 John 4:9
*
And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
Romans 8:28 and 29
For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38,39
*
Because a sinless Savior died,
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God, the Just, is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me
*
In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
1 John 4:9
*
And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
Romans 8:28 and 29
For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38,39
*
Because a sinless Savior died,
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God, the Just, is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me
Friday, April 2, 2010
GOOD FRIDAY, 1613, RIDING WESTWARD
LET man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes ?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us ? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our soul's, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg'd and torn ?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,
Who was God's partner here, and furnish'd thus
Half of that sacrifice which ransom'd us ?
Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They're present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them ; and Thou look'st towards me,
O Saviour, as Thou hang'st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.
O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rust, and my deformity ;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I'll turn my face.
John Donne
*
It is only now that I begin to understand the deep theology locked within Donne's poems. The last 6 lines of the poem is a prayer for sanctification and disipline - one every true believer who has known his own wretchedness and who falls to his knees in a heap, prays. We ask for mercy and grace because - in the words of another poet - in the course of justice,none of us should see salvation.
Good Friday is a great and terrible celebration of the depth of our depravity and the height of God's faithfulness to His holiness, justice and love. It is a joy coloured with grief - joy that we may taste life and grief, that it took the death of Christ to redeem us from the grave.
*
When Jesus had spoken these words,he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, "Father,the hour has come;glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh,to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth,having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
John 17:1-5
Th' intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes ?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us ? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our soul's, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg'd and torn ?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,
Who was God's partner here, and furnish'd thus
Half of that sacrifice which ransom'd us ?
Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They're present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them ; and Thou look'st towards me,
O Saviour, as Thou hang'st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.
O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rust, and my deformity ;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I'll turn my face.
John Donne
*
It is only now that I begin to understand the deep theology locked within Donne's poems. The last 6 lines of the poem is a prayer for sanctification and disipline - one every true believer who has known his own wretchedness and who falls to his knees in a heap, prays. We ask for mercy and grace because - in the words of another poet - in the course of justice,none of us should see salvation.
Good Friday is a great and terrible celebration of the depth of our depravity and the height of God's faithfulness to His holiness, justice and love. It is a joy coloured with grief - joy that we may taste life and grief, that it took the death of Christ to redeem us from the grave.
*
When Jesus had spoken these words,he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, "Father,the hour has come;glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh,to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth,having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
John 17:1-5
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