Toward Real Liberty » American Culture

Testing the spirits in a world of Twitter

Jacob Gerber — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:00:59 +0000

Once upon a time, there was little confusion as to what a person ought to believe about something. You could always count on either the king or the priest or the prophet to go out of his way to ensure that you knew what to believe on all the important issues. Certainly, other people had differing opinions, but their voices rarely carried that far into the public square. (And if they did, those voices were generally not allowed to continue for all that much longer.)

Of course, these kings, priests, and prophets might not necessarily have pinned down the truth concerning a matter, but that was beside the point. They alone had the power to speak, and therefore they alone had the ability to influence their respective listeners.

But then democracy happened. Common people began to speak out their respective opinions, and they were aided by new technologies that allowed their voice to carry increasingly far at an increasingly quick pace: the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, the computer, and then the internet. Suddenly, we live in a world where anyone at all can weigh in on any matter, in any place, at any time, simply by tweeting from their cell phone.

We live in world with an abundance of spirits, pushing us to think and act and believe in so many different directions. Because of this, John’s plea becomes infinitely more relevant today:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1)

Even in John’s day there were many false prophets in the world, even though none of them had the ability to setup a blog on the internet. John has a very specific distortion of the truth that he wishes to warn his beloved about, and he will get to that topic in 1 John 4:2-3; however, we who live in 21st century America desperately need this verse alone.

Why? Because we rarely even try to test the spirits!

Certainly, we will not cross some intellectual lines–liberals reject what they hear from conservatives, and vice versa; people who adhere to any religion whatsoever (including atheism) tend to become offended when their religion is treated with contempt in public; etc.

Nevertheless, we don’t even think about the messages conveyed in the commercials we find so funny. We don’t recognize that our favorite sitcoms derive profound proselytizing power by portraying a particular worldview in regard to family, faith, sex, power, and money as absolutely normal. We are numb to how deeply we are shaped by the songs we sing along with on the radio.

Every message, no matter its medium, arises from one of two sources: the Spirit of Truth or the spirit of error (1 John 4:6). But before we can discern the source of a particular message, we must first heed John enough to recognize how many spirits (and their respective prophets) actually seek to influence us toward one of those two directions.

The first step in testing the spirits is learning to recognize the spirits that inundate us every day of our lives.

Ayn Rand wasn’t greedy – she was selfish

Jacob Gerber — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 13:01:51 +0000

Apparently it’s open hunting season on Ayn Rand, beginning with Gary Moore’s “Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Great Recession,” and picked up by Ben Witherington’s “Randian Libertarianism—-An Anti-Christian Credo.” I’m not entirely sure where it is all coming from, but here it is.

Now, I have HUGE reservations about Ayn Rand’s philosophy, especially since she was so vehemently anti-Christ. Take, for example, a line in the opening pages of The Fountainhead: “The church was a Gothic monument of shingles painted pigeon blue. It had stout wooden buttresses supporting nothing” (4, emphasis added). In a story exalting godless, man-centered architecture, that might be one of the most damning lines in the book.

The problem, though, is that these writers don’t *quite* understand Rand. They are accusing her of being greedy, when she was, in fact, selfish. In her philosophy, this is a huge difference. Greedy means, “Excessively desirous of acquiring or possessing, especially wishing to possess more than what one needs or deserves.” Selfish means, “Concerned chiefly or only with oneself.”

Where this becomes important is in her belief in “productive achievement as [man's] noblest activity” (quoted in Moore’s article). It is productive achievement–not money–that is most important to Rand. Rand absolutely loathed anyone who received more money than they deserved, even as she championed the right to make as much money as possible.

What’s the difference? In Rand’s utopia (seen mostly clearly in Atlas Shrugged), money was a pure reflection of what a man had produced. On the other hand, Rand’s novels are filled with rich, greedy antagonists who produce nothing, but nevertheless deceive and manipulate others out of their money.

So, Howard Roark in The Fountainhead refuses architecture contracts where his contractors demand to modify his designs. John Galt in Atlas Shrugged built a world for the geniuses–the producers–of the world to live together, including some who were (currently) poor, and excluding many who had long been rich. It is a world where every person produces to the best of their abilities for their own interest, and they trade their products in a purely free market for the products of others. For Rand, this is selfishness, not greed.

On the other hand, villains and fools like Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey, and James Taggart destroy wealth because they don’t produce anything of value–even though all are extremely greedy and wealthy.

For this reason, Ayn Rand cannot really be considered the “goddess of the recession,” because she too would have condemned greedy, manipulative CEOs who made their money through shady deals that had nothing to do with the value of a product–even as she would condemn the hypocritical government that has incentivized, brow-beaten, and all but extorted businesses to make the terrible financial decisions that were the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Rand would argue that this recession is the result of far too much greed and far too little selfishness (e.g., production in one’s self interest).

That said, Rand’s ethics were abysmal. She cared nothing for the poor, except in insisting that the poor should have the opportunity to work and produce. She had a horrific notion of “love” that she generally depicted with rape scenes. Moreover, I could never quite shake the question of “Why?” as I read her books. Why would you spend your life honing your craft for your own self-interest if you lost everything at your death? Some philosophies would see the public good or the bettering of the next generations as important, but for Rand, one’s self-interest is god. So why do all this?

As I said earlier, I don’t know why Christians are all of the sudden turning their attention against Ayn Rand. If you are interested in reading a much better and well documented essay, try John Piper’s essay, “The Ethics of Ayn Rand: Appreciation and Critique.” Piper describes my own sentiments toward Rand’s works well: “To this day, I find her writings paradoxically attractive.”

But in the interest of intellectual honesty, blaming Ayn Rand for the greed that led to the recession is neither fair nor accurate. As easy of a political target as she might be, we Christians need to be a little more shrewd as serpents, while yet innocent as doves.

Incentivize, Don’t Nationalize

Jacob Gerber — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:10:09 +0000

Steven A. Burd, the CEO of Safeway, wrote a brilliant editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal on how his company have cut almost 40% of health care costs, compared to the national average over the past few years.

The solution?

They bill health insurance premiums on the basis of behavior, following the auto insurance industry, rather than giving a flat rate of insurance to all, regardless of blood pressure, weight, tobacco usage, etc…:

As much as we would like to take credit for being a health-care innovator, Safeway has done nothing more than borrow from the well-tested automobile insurance model. For decades, driving behavior has been correlated with accident risk and has therefore translated into premium differences among drivers. Stated somewhat differently, the auto-insurance industry has long recognized the role of personal responsibility. As a result, bad behaviors (like speeding, tickets for failure to follow the rules of the road, and frequency of accidents) are considered when establishing insurance premiums. Bad driver premiums are not subsidized by the good driver premiums. As with most employers, Safeway’s employees pay a portion of their own health care through premiums, co-pays and deductibles. The big difference between Safeway and most employers is that we have pronounced differences in premiums that reflect each covered member’s behaviors. Our plan utilizes a provision in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that permits employers to differentiate premiums based on behaviors. Currently we are focused on tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

President Obama is right to recognize that rising health care costs mean serious problems to the American economy, but I think that he is disastrously wrong in his proposed solution.

Read Burd’s editorial here.