is what i do

I never thought I’d write a post praising moderate Islam. I’ve pretty much concluded that the phrase is an oxymoron, like “tolerant fundamentalist”. But this video is almost enough to convince me otherwise:

For one thing, it’s a lovely song, with lyrics that seem, from the subtitles, to be graceful and true. Its message is universal; although the images are of Islamic terrorists, and its clearly aimed at an Islamic audience and clearly intended to move that audience to reject terror, it is a song that any of us can sing with feeling and with broader intent. I call myself an atheist; you repeat the term, and there is venom in your tone. Yeh hum naheen. You look at an old white man; you see an Imperialist American, and you scowl and spit. Yeh hum naheen. I look at a cluster of Hasids in Williamsburg; I think of their wives, bewigged and burdened with babies, and I see deluded oppressors. Yeh hum naheen. This is not us; I am not that: not that one you reduce me to, not that one you label me, not one at all, but many, and you as well. Yeh hum naheen.

I can see this song joining others I have sung in my life whose lyrics were not in my tongue, but whose meaning added richness to my life: Die Gedanken est frei, Kumbaya, Guantanamera, Viva la Quince Brigada, Hey, Zhankoye. I will listen again. And again. I hope to hear it sung by many who are not Muslims.

I am still suspicious of and disgusted by Islam as it is revealed in the Koran, just as I am suspicious of and disgusted by Judaism as it’s revealed in the Torah, and by Christianity as it’s revealed in the Gospels, in Revelations, and in the epistles of Paul. Those books are full of bile and vengeful rage; the God Who terrified their authors is a paranoid solipsistic SOB, powerless, irrelevant, and almost certainly illusory. Those who believe that God to be real and who try to live their lives according to His will are to be pitied.

But this is a great song, and it carries a message we would all do well to hear and to integrate into our view of things and our habits of mind. There’s a website and a foundation. There is a petition against terrorism, which millions of Pakistanis have signed – more Pakistanis have signed the petition than voted in the last Pakistani election. That is hopeful.

Incompletely developed thoughts, loosely connected:

• It’s not spending. It’s buying. The government is not spending our money when it builds roads and subsidizes the employment of teachers and health care workers; it’s buying us better roads, better schools, better hospitals.
• Economics is not an empirical science. It’s reasoned guessing. That’s why there’s no Standard Theory in economics, like there is in Biology and Physics.
• What’s happened in the past 30 years is new, radically new. The development of information technology, and the use of that technology to control machines, requires that we think differently about cost, price, and profit: no theories developed before about 1975 can deal with the dramatic drop in manufacturing and service delivery costs that have happened since then.
• Steady or gently rising prices, plus plummeting costs, have created enormous profits, inflating investor wealth and expectations way beyond what was reasonable before 1975.
• The general idea that we have been pretty much immune to inflation in recent times is an illusion. Falling costs (which involve stagnant or falling wages and fewer jobs) have very much the same effect as classical inflation.
• By the same token, deflation, when the disparity between price and cost has gotten so out of line, is not the horrendous event that classical economic theory imagines the word to describe.
• When costs drop, innovative effort requires less capital investment; the big losers in a deflationary economy are the capitalists. Fuck ‘em.
• The cost to government of stimulating innovation and increased production of commodities (including commodity services like education and health care) is not great in an economy in which costs are dropping dramatically and steadily. Government is in a better position to measure its return on stimulus investment in terms appropriate to the well-being of the society and is not (or should not be) concerned, as a private investor must be, about maximizing the monetary return on its investment.
• There are a lot of people used to working who have lost their jobs. Deflation doesn’t help them much; if there’s no money coming in, it doesn’t really matter much how low prices fall. Those people need jobs, which intelligent government stimulus will generate, and, until those jobs materialize, they need help getting by.
• I don’t need direct help, at least right now. I don’t need tax cuts or checks in the mail; deflation will take care of me in that regard. I want the government to buy me stuff that it’s unrealistic to expect private capitalism to buy me, and to create jobs in the process, so that civic order and individual pride and responsibility can be maintained.

How much sense is there in all this?

“My life is never dictated by superstitions. My faith is first and foremost. If you believe that God’s in control, there is no reason to believe in superstitions.”