Kenyon Observer Kenyon Observer the the
March 1, 2013
September 25, 2012
Sodexo, a Story:
James Neimeister|page 6
A Pope Resigned Reconciling Faith and Modernity in the Aging Catholic Church
Thomas Mattes | page 10
Kenyon’s Oldest Undergraduate Political and Cultural Magazine
Kenyon Observer the
March 1, 2013
The Kenyon Observer March 1, 2013
5 From the Editors
Editors-in-Chief Gabriel Rom and Jon Green
Cover Story
Managing Editor Megan Shaw
thomas mattes
10 A Pope Resigned
Reconciling Faith and Modernity in the Aging Catholic Church
6
andrew gabel
The Uncertain Rise of China conrad jacober
8 Ideology and Its Casualties
Rediscovering Critique in a Time of Apologetics
Online Editor Yoni Wilkenfeld Featured Contributors Andrew Gabel, Fred Hill, Conrad Jacober, Lauren Johnstone, Thomas Mattes and Stephen Raithel Layout/Design Sofia Mandel
stephen raithel
12 What Should We Do?
Illustrations Nick Nazmi and Peter Falls
A Meditation on Choice lauren johnstone (eco)
14 Dirty Investments and Clean Solutions The Case for Divestment
Faculty Advisors Professor Fred Baumann and Professor Pamela Jensen The Kenyon Observer is a student-run publication that is distributed biweekly on the campus of Kenyon College. The opinions expressed within this publication belong only to the writers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Observer staff or that of Kenyon College. The Kenyon Observer will accept submissions and lettersto-the-editor, but reserves the right to edit for length and clarity. All submissions must be received at least a week prior to publication. Submit to tko@kenyon.edu
Cover Art by Nick Nazmi
5
FROM THE EDITORS
Dear Prospective Reader, The Kenyon Observer is pleased to put forward a new issue, bringing together voices from across our campus. In our cover story, Thomas Mattes puts Pope Benedict’s resignation in the historical context of the Papacy’s cultural role. Andrew Gabel debunks the conventional wisdom on China’s future as a global superpower and Conrad Jacober takes on the ideological assumptions which undergird the American way of life. In a continuing series presenting research from senior theses and honors work, Stephen Raithel tells us how to make our decisions like a math major would. Finally, Lauren Johnstone gives ECO’s take on the recent debate over divestment. As always, we invite readers to engage with and respond to the content in our publication, through letters to the editor and full-length submissions. Your editors, Gabriel Rom and Jon Green
6
ANDREW GABEL
The Uncertain Rise of China It is difficult to pick up a newspaper without reading about the impending supremacy of China. This feeling of preemptive inadequacy has become so deeply ingrained in the United States leadership and chattering classes that many intelligent, experienced policy officials and political commentators have begun looking across the Pacific Ocean with a surprising degree of longing. It has become a truism that the Chinese juggernaut will soon “overtake” a tired and stagnating United States. But will it? There is a surprisingly strong contrarian case to be made in favor of exactly the opposite: that China is in many ways weaker than it is portrayed with a trajectory far from assured. The glistening cities on the Chinese coast are, both visually and architecturally, quite impressive. To the casual observer (or the impassioned pundit), nothing underscores America’s inexorable decline more than a Chinese skyscraper or ultra-modern airport. While it is true that China’s total GDP (Gross Domestic Product) may surpass that of the United States in the coming years, this hardly paints a complete picture of the Chinese economy. In fact, it is highly misleading. For instance, according the CIA World Factbook, China has an adjusted GDP-per capita of just $8,500, putting it decisively below countries such the Dominican Republic, East Timor and even Cuba. So while its total output as a country is rather large, the wealth is spread among so many people that the individual Chinese citizen is in actuality quite impoverished. Keep this in mind any time you read column fawning over China’s economic achievements. In reality, that number is actually rather generous because it is an average; it takes the entire GDP of China and crudely divides it by the population. What this means in practice is that, for every nouveau yuppie chatting on an iPhone in Beijing, there are overwhelmingly more of his countrymen living in abject poverty. The median income in China is significantly lower and, according to the state-run People’s Daily, over 150 million Chinese citi-
zens live on under $1 a day. The vast majority of those living in China are poor even by the standards of developing countries. Furthermore, the gleam of those recently constructed cities does not outshine the fact that 1 in 4 Chinese do not even have access to running water. In China, the country so many in the U.S. seemed to have developed an inferiority complex towards, 250 million people (the entire U.S. population during the mid-1980s) lack basic plumbing, an amenity the average American have taken for granted since the second Roosevelt administration. As if that were not enough, 30 to 40 million Chinese still live in caves—equivelent to the entire populations of New Hampshire, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts and Indiana. Only then can one really begin to understand the difficulties facing Chinese modernization efforts. So while most of the news reports Americans see regarding China’s economic growth consist of cheer-leading its coastal urbanization, the fact remains that many parts of China, usually ignored by the media, make Kabul look like Times Square. All that being said, the Chinese economy looks, at a distance, very strong. It has put up double digit growth numbers for essentially 25-straight years, even through the global recession, and it has continued to produce quarterly rates that make Western leaders green with envy. But before putting too much stock in raw numbers, it is important to put them in perspective. When China first began to liberalize its economy, after the selfimposed disasters that were the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, it was one of the poorest nations on Earth (the fact that after decades of double-digit growth it’s GDP per-capita stands at only $8,500 speaks to this fact). Historically, countries starting from low bases of wealth grow much faster than those already rich. The similarly-spectacular rates of growth experienced by Germany and Japan immediately following the Second
“Inflation is just like alcoholism: the good effects come first” Milton Friedman
7
World War as those nations literally rebuilt themselves from rubble are prime examples. This “catch-up” growth is produced by taking advantage of relatively easy gains inherent in undeveloped countries such as the necessarily high marginal product of capital and, in the case of China, an efficient reallocation of labor. When the Chinese government takes an illiterate peasant farmer, teaches him how to read and puts him in a factory, his productivity increases enormously in the process. Such a strategy has served China well but, due to the laws of diminishing returns, it is not sustainable. Extensive growth has its limits and, sooner or later, gains from such “low-hanging fruit” dry up (the marginal benefit derived from putting the first farmer in the factory is much greater than putting the 300 millionth). Future growth will depend more on innovation, entrepreneurship and efficient capital formation and less on government-backed investment projects. It is an open question as to whether China will be able to keep up its current astronomical growth rates as its baseline prosperity rises and the source of its growth evolves. But perhaps the strongest case to be made against China’s ascendancy centers on its demographical trends. China’s horrific one-child-policy, morality aside, distorted its population irrevocably. In restricting births, the Chinese government has insured that there will be too few replacement workers to take over as the general population ages. When this happens, productivity will suffer accordingly. Even though the State has rolled back some of the more draconian regulations, China’s birth rate has not recovered. A 2012 study conducted by the Brookings Institute noted that “over 40% of all middle-aged Chinese couples have only one child” and that “it will take less than 30 years for the share of the population aged over 65 to rise from the current 9% to 25%”. It goes on to conclude that between “1980-2010, the effect of a favorable population age structure accounted for between 15% and 25% of per-capita GDP growth”. The age structure upon which so much of China’s growth has been built was never sustainable and, unfortunately for China, the positive population trends are already beginning to reverse. As the century progresses, China’s population will become top-heavy, with more and more of the elderly relying on a shrinking pool of young workers. China is not the only country that is facing a rapidly aging population but its problems are worse than any other given its size and relative poverty. China’s inevitable slowdown in economic growth combined with its demographic time bomb points to one conclusion: future stagnation. Simply put, China will become gray long before it becomes wealthy. Indeed, there are signals that China is already starting to falter. Growth has slowed and the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences estimates that over 90,000 protests, or “mass incidents” as they are called in China, are already happening every year (unreported by the state-run media of course). Inflation has been a growing problem and there are signs of a real-estate bubble forming. All throughout China’s rise, political stability has been bought by economic growth. Any retardation in the rate of growth, and the tacit social-economic contract between the Chinese government and its people, a collection of distinct ethnic and cultural factions, begins to fray. If this happens, Chinese society may follow suit, fragmenting along historical lines. Moreover, the country faces serious socio-economic challenges as the value of its currency rises, reducing the competitiveness of its exports, and as it transitions from an economy based on state-financed capital investments to a more traditional consumption-based economy. Both of these scenarios could exacerbate latent ethnic and regional tensions which might result in a political upheaval, something that would obviously pose a serious threat to China’s ascendancy. None of this is to say that China will not remain influential in the coming years and decades. Its economy will likely continue to grow, though at a slower pace, as will its global footprint. Nor am I suggesting that China is on the brink of collapse. The Communist Party has shown itself to be remarkably durable, keeping the country unified through famines, market reforms, mass urbanization and, recently, the proliferation of information technology. The ability of the Chinese government to keep order should not be underestimated. However, China, like all countries, faces severe challenges and is not immune to their effects (as the punditry would seem to have us believe). Unfortunately, much of the current analysis about the country is incomplete and mirrors the lazy conventional wisdom of the 1970s and 1980s which, impressed by Japan’s high rate of extensive growth, foresaw the rise of a Japanese super-state that would purportedly come to dwarf the United States. For all the fanfare back then, starting in the early 1990s, Japan began to stagnate and has been doing so ever since. Faced with a demographic crisis of its own, a highly leveraged economy and political inertia, Japan has yet to break out of its multi-decade long economic coma. When China reaches the tipping point in its population bulge and per-capita growth rate, something similar may well occur. China’s meteoric rise, while astonishing, faces serious road bumps ahead and the country’s transformation into a global superpower is anything but certain. History is not inevitable and the debate surrounding China should be a real one, not simply a mechanism for projecting current frustration with the American political or economic system.TKO
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable” John Galbraith
8
CONRAD JACOBER
Ideology and Its Casualties REDISCOVERING CRITIQUE IN A TIME OF APOLOGETICS István Mészáros, philosophy professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, characterizes one type of ideology as that which “supports the given order with uncritical attitude, adopting and glorifying the immediacy of the dominant system—no matter how problematical and full of contradictions—as the absolute horizon of social life itself.” This is the type of ideology most profuse in the world today and the one with which this essay is concerned. In his article “Murica and Other Fallacies” (The Kenyon Observer, January 30th, 2013), Ryan Baker characterizes the United States as a country where “you can be what you want to be.” He continues, “this kind of individual freedom is the premise that our country was founded upon.” If we understand “‘Murica” to be representative of extreme patriotism, then the title of Baker’s essay suggests otherwise. Far from a fallacy, the ideology of patriotism, characterized by an “uncritical attitude, adopting and glorifying” the country, is exactly what pervades Baker’s essay. Individual freedom forms the ideological foundations of our country; the truly existing structures of our American society are far from embodying any notion of freedom. As Ville Lampi puts it in his response to Baker’s article (February 15th, 2013), “many high schools do not have qualified teachers, some school districts cannot afford books.” If by freedom one means freedom to precarious poverty, an exploitive and stratified justice system, poor access to good education and healthcare and a purchased political system, then by all means we are a nation of individual freedom. If one does not accept this notion of freedom, then the idea that we are a nation of individual freedom
whereby one can become what one wishes is more of an ideological defense of injustice than a statement of our true national character. This patriotic ideology pervades our society. In the recent State of the Union address, President Obama stated, “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.” The sad truth is that she does not have the same chance to succeed as a child born into extravagant wealth. She is not born free. She is not born equal. If faced with the actual statistics regarding the socioeconomic mobility of the poorest in comparison to the wealthiest, President Obama would have no choice but to retract his statement or admit to pure ideological rhetoric. The idea that the children of the poor and the wealthy have the same chance to succeed in life is a purely ideological masking of what is really the cold hard reality: where one ends up in life is inextricably tied to the luck of one’s birth. It does not have to be this way, but it is the uncritical and self-aggrandizing attitude of this ideology that aims to dissolve, mask and obscure the harsh realities of American society: that we are not free, we are not great, we are a class society, we are riddled with inequalities, we are more stratified in wealth disparity than ever before and more than any other Western societies. We are a sputtering empire that cannot manage to muster the most basic of social securities for its peoples because of the purchased and ideological nature that constitutes what most still call our “liberal democracy.”
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please” Karl Marx
9
We are well apprised of the terminology that most often constitutes the ideological defense of our American society: personal freedom, liberty, equality, individual choice, opportunity, etc. These terms have all become contentless concepts, cannon-fired into the minds of every citizen, privileged and nonprivileged alike, to justify what in reality are their exact opposites. This patriotic ideology halts most criticism, and
“We
are a sputtering empire
that cannot manage to muster the most basic of social securities for its peoples because of the purchased and ideological nature that constitutes what most still call our
“liberal democracy”
the criticism that remains accepts the fundamental ideological assumptions about the nature of this nation. It struggles at the surface level and fails to delve into any critique of underlying structures, such as an economic system fundamentally characterized by exploitation, profiteering, and destruction. The result of this ideology is that those who benefit from the structures of inequality and wealth stratification continue to benefit, while those who suffer and falter under those structures do so while simultaneously upholding them, whether explicitly or implicitly. This ideology has many casualties. When Osama bin Laden died, most of the nation cheered. What was not seen and had not been seen for all the years of that manhunt was any lamenting for the thousands of innocents killed and hundreds of thousands more destroyed and displaced in the path of utter destruction, torture and disembodiment. Not to mention that there was no attempt to understand why such a figure as Osama bin Laden would exist, let alone have any support of locals. What we would find is that his existence and that of much of the terrorism in the Middle East stems directly from the intervention of the United States and other Western nations in the great drive of economic interests, such as the opening of markets and privatization of natural resources, under the ideological guise of instituting freedom and democracy. There is no defense of the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government, whose only “mistake” was
the 1951 nationalization of their oil industry and the threat it posed to Western domination and economic interests. Of course, the reason President Eisenhower and company gave for the coup d’etat was the existence of a “communist danger.” A more contemporary example, the LAPD manhunt for Christopher Dorner, a recently fired cop accused of four murders, saw the LAPD open fire on and injure innocent bystanders on multiple occasions. The focus of the manhunt reporting was centered around elements of madness in Dorner’s manifesto. What went largely unreported were his cries of racism, excessive force and severe injustice in the LAPD, cries that many have given for decades. Dorner is dead, and the story is largely over, but there is an element of truth in the Onion’s satirical reporting which stated, “Los Angeles residents are reportedly on edge today following reports that hundreds of armed and extremely dangerous LAPD officers are resuming regular patrolling duties after the conclusion of Tuesday’s manhunt.” The problem of police abuse and unaccountability which plagues many large cities was neither the focus nor a minor element of the reporting, despite the fact that it was evident in the very manhunt itself. What we find yet again is the pervasiveness of ideology in the form of police force righteousness and an uncritical attitude towards abuse, the understanding of which could bring light to injustices that ought to be righted. We must recognize the totalizing nature of ideology to more fully understand injustice and its defenders. As Mészáros says, “it is a question of understanding how the fundamental structural characteristics of a determinate social order assert themselves on the relevant scale and circumscribe the alternative modes of conceptualization of all the major practical issues.” An understanding of the power of ideology must be employed to grasp the ways in which it shapes and impresses itself upon all discourse, ideas, and our daily lives. This will lead us to an understanding of why certain alternative conceptions are ignored and often not taken seriously at all. A rediscovery of a critical mind, keyed towards the recognition of certain structures of society that enforce dominance, exploitation, and power, will lead to an understanding of society, the alternatives, and what must be done to achieve a world that embodies the true content of the concepts most often used as ideological weaponry: freedom, liberty, equality, justice, and equal opportunity. To do otherwise is to unquestioningly accept the casualties of ideology, the reality that what exists is the exact opposite of those enlightenment ideals.TKO
“The capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism” Terry Eagleton
10
THOMAS MATTES
A Pope Resigned RECONCILING FAITH AND MODERNITY IN THE AGING CATHOLIC CHURCH
From 1981 until his election as Pope in 2005, Joseph Ratzinger, or Pope Benedict XVI as we know him now, was the Vatican’s primary theologian. With Pope John Paul II travelling the world, receiving the praises of the masses for his humanitarian causes and amicable persona, Ratzinger stayed home, working in the background to foster an ideology of widereaching conservatism, seeking to end and retract the liberalization brought forth with the Second Vatican Council twenty years earlier. As Pope, he has done what he could to maintain this course. He has worked to position relativism as the great villain of the 21st century, forcing the unknowing faithful into a modern world where moral truths are left to subjectivity. He has spent his career fighting the increasing secularization of the Church and the world at large that carries this relativism into his church, shaping a Vatican that stands as the last bastion of tradition in the face of the tidal wave of modernity. No same-sex marriage. No abortion. No condoms. No female priests. He hates Communists, but he is not fond of Capitalists either. As long as he was there, the modern world would only be allowed so much ground. He not only put up barriers against modernity, but he more often than not refused to admit to its increasingly inevitable arrival. And yet, with his resignation from the Papacy on
February 11th, he has opened the Vatican’s doors to the secular and modern world in a way never encountered before. With this one decision he has negated his life’s work. The Second Vatican Council may have liberalized the church. The Popes may have formerly conquered and held court like kings. But never before has the position seemed so utterly secular. Never before has the man holding the keys to the kingdom of Heaven seemed so utterly fallible. The last Pope to resign was Gregory XII in 1415. That was a time when three men in three differing locations all claimed the leadership of the church. To finally end the conf lict, the popes and anti-popes were forced to resign and a new Pope, Martin V, was elected. There were no resignations for 598 years, and even Pope Gregory’s resignation was undeniably very different. This is a moment without precedent. Nevertheless, it is impossible to talk about Ratzinger without talking about the failures of the Church in recent years. People are attending mass less and less. Young people are either leaving the church in droves or never involved themselves in the first place. There is a shortage of priests like never before. And even now in the developing world where John Paul had found so much room for growth, the church struggles to compete with the rapid growth of evangelism and that same increasing modernity brought
“You can never say again that you did not know” William Wilberforce
11 with this globalized world. Worst of all perhaps, Ratzinger has done next to nothing to address the issue of sex crimes by the clergy—a blight like no other for the Church’s faithful worldwide.
“N obody
finds
theology
entertaining . faith
N obody finds entertaining . Y et ,
there is a reason so many people rely on it .”
Ratzinger’s time as Pope has been problematic at best. He has sought to grapple with the issues of the modern world and push back at increasing secularization, but he has largely failed. Now to cap it all off, with this resignation, he has admitted to the absolute impotence of his own papacy and increasingly the entirety of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the Vatican is indeed responsible for real, practical issues—administrative, political, financial, social—the role of the Pope itself is one of primarily religious and symbolic purpose. Since the time of St. Peter, the first Bishop of Rome, the Pope has been entrusted with the symbolic position of the Shepherd guiding the f lock towards Heaven. In paintings, tapestries and stained glass windows, the Pope holds the keys to the kingdom of Heaven entrusted to St. Peter and his successors by Jesus. The Pope is the rock upon which the church is built. It is a position that, over thousand of years, has been manipulated, bought and sold, and devalued. However, no matter these political and historical complications, the position of Pope is one of first and foremost symbolic significance. He is the spiritual guide. There is nothing physical, nothing carnal, nothing of the f lesh, to consider. Upon his resignation, Ratzinger announced: “I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.” John Paul, for all the complications involved in his papacy, at least understood that physical strength is insignificant; strength of the spirit is what matters to the faithful. John Paul’s last days were spent in agony as far as we can tell. Wracked with Parkinson’s’ Disease, he went on. His was a life of suffering, but of carrying on with that suffering. He fought in the
Polish Resistance against the Nazis, he completed his studies in secret. And he died old and sick and likely in great pain. He died as a manifestation of extreme faith—something to be expected considering his charisma, and his care for the world’s faithful. He understood that every time he stood on the balcony at St. Peter’s and struggled to lift his head, every Catholic saw and felt his suffering—evidence that everyone suffers, but that even in suffering, there is still faith. His death was one of great symbolic importance, fitting for a position based on, more than anything else, great symbolic importance. Now we have a Pope who has allowed the secular world to overcome his spiritual position—who has allowed the troubles of the f lesh to overcome him. There is a reason that Showtime has a series called The Borgias and not The Roncallis—because Rodrigo Borgia had a bunch of bastard children and got a lot of people killed and Angelo Roncalli led the Second Vatican Council. Nobody finds theology entertaining. Nobody finds faith entertaining. Yet, there is a reason so many people rely on it. There is a reason Rodrigo Borgia is a despised villain and there is a reason John Paul is so loved. The Pope and his Church exist not for this world. He exists for a world that we cannot see or touch but that exists for so many people nevertheless: that of faith. Ratzinger has spent his entire life attempting to hold back the perceived assault that has carried this material world over into that of the spiritual. Yet,
“J ohn that
P aul physical
insignificant ;
understood strength strength
is of
the spirit is what matters to the faithful .” here he stands, bowing out when he is weak and old, unable to handle the day to day. He has left without precedent. The tidal wave of secularism and relativism and unabashed, unforgiving modernity has crashed ashore. For 85 year-old Joseph Ratzinger, the f lesh has won out and worn out, and he cannot, so he thinks, adequately lead. This is a loss that may never be overcome, that may never be reversed. For now, it is time to recognize that this world has enough leaders, and could use a few more Shepherds.TKO
“In God we trust; all others bring data” Dr. Edwards Deming
12
STEPHEN RAITHEL
What Should We Do? A MEDITATION ON CHOICE Should I study for my test or go play basketball? moment was the blip ambiguous. Riley’s unconscious Should I go to Old Kenyon tonight or stay in my New mind picked up on this transient discrepancy, nudging Apt? Should I bother waiting in the omelet line? As a him toward the right decision. creature capable of some degree of forethought, what Lehrer’s ultimate point in this instance is something tools do I have at my disposal to navigate these deci- about the power of emotions and intuitions in indisions? viduals habituated by extensive training. Riley made In a popular anecdote from How We Decide, Jonah the right choice because he picked up on something of Lehrer gives a plug for the emotions. He tells a story which he wasn’t even consciously aware. The anecdote of Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley who attend- is an interesting one, and a valid one when we consider ed the radar station on the HMS Gloucester, a British the merits of, or our capacity for, rationality in our dedestroyer. Riley spent hours on end staring at seem- cisions. ingly identical blips, which usually signified passing But what about the more mundane questions that Allied fighter jets, but sudstarted this article? What denly something new caught ehrer s ultimate point in about decisions in which we his eye. Something about this haven’t been trained and we radar blip seemed different, this instance is something don’t have much confidence in but he couldn’t quite say what. about the power of emotions our gut? It might be just another AlThese questions prompted lied jet flying overhead, but it and intuitions in individu some research that eventually could also be a missile coming ended in my Senior Exercise in at high altitude. Should he als habituated by extensive about a technical aspect of the shoot it down or not? Making training branch of mathematics known the wrong choice, blowing up as statistical decision theory. the jet of an ally or letting an To illustrate the power and elenemy missile sink a ship, would incur tremendous loss. egance of this type of mathematical analysis, let’s conStaring at the blip for almost a minute, unable to distin- sider a simplified medical example. guish between the two possibilities, Riley ordered the Specifically, let’s consider a rural doctor who sees object to be shot down. And he was right. the whole gamut of patients. Some patients present Riley, though assured in his choice, considered him- clear signs—their hand is cut and needs stitches, or self lucky. He reviewed the tapes and still couldn’t see their leg is broken and needs to be set. But this is hardly any sign indicating if it was a missile or a friendly jet. To the usual picture. Often, a patient presents ambiguous Riley, it seemed that his mind didn’t know what his gut signs or symptoms that could imply a variety of disdid. Many years later, an expert reviewed the tapes and eases and appropriate treatments. realized that in the first moment the blip appeared, you In this light, imagine a patient who approaches our could clearly tell it was a missile. Only after this first rural doctor and complains of faintness of breath. In a
“L
’
-
”
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake” Napoleon Bonaparte
13
vastly simplified world, it could be either heart disease or lung disease. Importantly, the treatments for one disease are grossly inappropriate for the other disease: heart surgery would not do any good for asthma; an inhaler wouldn’t help a heart defect. What should the doctor do? On what grounds should he make his decision? In the decision theory jargon, what decisions are admissible? Like Michael Riley in Lehrer’s anecdote, the doctor might very well make a decision based on how he feels, but most of us would like to have some rational justification from a doctor before we undergo surgery. What are the pertinent bits of information? If we were to analyze the problem more fully, we would first ask for some data to understand how likely it is that the patient has each disease. Maybe we could run a stress test to figure out the likelihood of heart disease, but we would also need to know the weaknesses of the test by understanding the frequency of incorrect results given by the test. Next, we would try to quantify the different damages done by correctly and wrongly treating the certain disease. For example, maybe giving heart surgery to the asthmatic does five-times as much damage to the patient as giving an inhaler to the individual with a weak heart. Maybe leaving the asthma untreated is half as dangerous as leaving the heart condition untreated. Even if the diagnosis was a toss up between heart disease and lung disease, we would want to know the stakes for the decision game we play. Finally, after we know the stakes of the decision and the probabilities of the different outcomes, after we know the likelihood the test is wrong, we would need to know what we want. Are we trying to get the best result on average, with a risk of causing disasters? Are we trying to avoid the worst-case scenarios? These different questions imply different algorithms to get to the solution. I want to sweep the reason for this, as well as the actual mathematics with its probability theory and calculus, under the rug and jump to the conclusion. Once we put the appropriate numbers in place and jump through the right hoops, there is an answer. A computer can crunch the numbers and spit out the answer. You’ll have to trust me on this. We could write a rule for the physician to follow about when to give heart surgery and when to give an inhaler. The rule would be relative to the power and accuracy of the stress test. The decision rule would also be relative to how we think the different possible bad outcomes compare, and how it is bad to get unnecessary surgery. Of course, as with any field that deals
with decisions under uncertainty, the physician will be wrong sometimes while following our decision rule, but our decision rule would guarantee that he would do less damage (and more good) than any other rule. One limitation of the decision theoretic paradigm is that it is time consuming. There is a reason that not even the most intrepid mathematician gets out paper and pencil for every choice. Another is that all the possibilities have to be known and the associated probabilities of those events estimated; unfortunately, in reality, we don’t know what we don’t know and there might be outcomes we don’t expect at all. This hyper-Spock-like rationality turns on the ability to map a consequence in real life onto a single number to represent the “loss,” which might damningly simplify the complexities of decisions in a moral realm. This said, decision theoretic paradigms are used in fields from forest management to portfolio allocation, from medicine to experimental design. And, by understanding this mathematically justified way to make decisions, perhaps we gain some new insight into the anecdote concerning Lieutenant Captain Michael Riley. Though Riley could not consciously understand which event the blip on the radar signified, his decision had nevertheless been altered by it. There is nothing mystical about how Riley decided to shoot down the missile. He made a choice based on the data available, though it was data that his unconscious collected and hid from him. He also made a choice, in part, on the severity of the different consequences incurred by the wrong choice. In short, it sounds like his problem was one that could be analyzed by statistical decision theory. I am not saying that our brains run through an algorithm like the one I’ve glossed over in this paper. In fact, from a tourist’s perspective of evolutionary psychology, I really doubt it. But while our brain might not have this algorithm, another “brain” could. It’s a problem in computation that a computer could conceivably solve. In many medical examples like the one I’ve highlighted, the decision problem is one that many engineers and computer scientists are working on so that computers may eventually solve problems like the medical example that I highlighted. Think of the wonderful strangeness of this topic: how cleanly mathematics could answer a problem that might seem intractable and doomed; how mathematics can actually relate to and model the real world at all; the complexity inherent in our own circuitry programming other circuitry to hopefully solve problems better than we can. It’s weird. And if you ask me, it’s pretty cool too.TKO
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers” Pablo Picasso
14
LAUREN JOHNSTONE (ECO)
Dirty Investments and Clean Solutions THE CASE FOR DIVESTMENT Tuition alone is not enough to run Kenyon College. In order to pay its bills, professors, maintenance workers, AVI contract and everything else, Kenyon must raise extra funds in the form of an endowment. These funds are invested in order to foster growth and turn a profit. Naturally, the college’s portfolio is diverse, as it attempts to maximize its profit and avoid having to reduce financial aid packages or raise tuition in order to meet its financial obligations. But this investment strategy comes with social cost: we find ourselves in a situation in which Kenyon’s investments endorse and encourage the use of fossil fuels at a time when energy conservation should be an increasingly important priority. The current divestment campaign aims to take these invested funds out of fossil fuel companies. The numerous reasons for this movement are all rooted in the dire urgency of climate change. Most of us are already familiar with the science: the combustion of fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere. These gases create a greenhouse effect which traps incoming heat inside the earth’s atmosphere. This heating creates a disastrous feedback loop, whose ultimate effects remain largely unknown. To put the issue in perspective, however, the World Bank, a group dedicated to reducing global poverty, recently announced that it will not be able to operate in a world warmed to 4 degrees Celsius
higher than pre-industrial temperatures. We’ve already warmed the world 0.8 degrees Celsius, and our current trajectory puts us on track for a 6 degree rise. The divestment campaign insists that our institution should not have any fiscal ties to the fossil fuel industry. It is immoral on our part to gain any form of profit while people suffer each year at the hands of an increasingly disastrous climate. Storms like Hurricane Sandy are becoming more frequent, droughts more commonplace, forest fires are lasting longer and covering more land and island nations are beginning to disappear under rising seas. And these kinds of catastrophes are disproportionately affecting poorer communities. With divestment, Kenyon would take a stand against the fossil fuel industry’s destructive business. The return that Kenyon earns on its investments cannot come at the expense of human and planetary health. We can make our money elsewhere. It’s no surprise that the fossil fuel industry is wildly profitable: the world wants cheap energy. And it would be misguided to fault the energy industry for using the free market to efficiently distribute natural resources to new markets. Their doing so has helped develop communities that would otherwise be living in pre-industrial conditions. However, rampant and unregulated growth in the world’s consumption of fossil fuels is not a sustainable path forward. At a certain point, we run the risk of developing ourselves out of existence.
“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives” Abba Eban
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Perhaps divestment appears a bit far-fetched in tackling the inherent problem with the industry. It is true that Kenyon’s divesting will not make much of a difference in the global market for oil. We are a small institution with a small endowment—according to the most recent available figures, about $184 million. In fact, even if every college and university divested from fossil fuels, these goliath companies would not take a hit. Divestment, however, goes beyond the pockets of these companies. Schools would be sending a strong message that as educators preparing young adults for the future, it is reprehensible to benefit in the short-term from something that threatens that future. We would also be doing what endowments are intended to do, that is, provide generational equity by ensuring the college’s survival for graduating classes to come. Our economy, by choice or by eventual necessity, will be forced to run on something other than fossil fuels. By divesting now, Kenyon will set a precedent for forwardthinking institutions, showing that it is possible to be both profitable without sacrificing principle. While the divestment campaign is only focused on separating Kenyon’s money from the fossil fuel industry, it does have a few ideas about where that money could be reinvested. In the coming years, renewable energy will power the world. If we shift towards renewables sooner rather than later we will avoid the unnecessary environmental and human degradation that our environmental intransigence is leading us towards. Renewable energy companies need capital to become price-competitive with fossil fuel companies; our investments can provide some of that necessary capital. Coal, oil and gas have seen the field tilted in its favor for too many years. The green energy industry is poised for a boom, provided it receives moral and financial backing. Divestment is not only in Kenyon’s moral interest, it doesn’t even effectively cut against Kenyon’s financial interest. Approximately 2-3% of our endowment is held in fossil fuel companies. Moreover, according to financial sources within the administration, the funds in question are used only minimally (approximately 7%) in our operating budget. Therefore, to pull this 2-3% of our stocks from fossil fuel companies would not be detrimental to the endowment or to the college. One popular argument against divestment is that our financial advisors need not be ethics advisors. While this may be true, one does not need to be formally tied to ethics to act ethically. It is absurd to think one is absolved of their duty to act ethically
when that is not in their job title. With every action, as world citizens, we are obliged to think of the moral implications. While this complicates the matter of investment, it is our moral duty. Through the divestment campaign, we hope to plant the seeds for these kinds of conversations. As members of a
“D ivestment is not only in K enyon ’ s moral interest , it doesn ’ t even effectively cut against K enyon ’ s finan cial interest .” larger Kenyon community, we ought to be able to question the decisions our administration makes on our behalf. Perhaps the most important part of divestment is the understanding of the impact investments can have. The college movement in the 1980’s to divest from Apartheid South Africa has been credited with helping end Apartheid. When 155 schools pulled their money out of companies that had holds tied the apartheid regime, they hurt the South African economy and directly gained the government’s attention. The fossil fuel divestment movement started last year by 350.org and Bill McK ibben aims to have a similar effect on the fossil fuel economy. The hope is that through the retraction of investments, the companies and United States government will listen. At Kenyon, we have been progressing with our divestment campaign throughout the semester. We have created a group of students passionate about the environment that see divestment as a powerful action our college should take. We have released a petition that has over 550 signatures. We have been talking with administrators, trustees and alumni. Throughout the campaign we have worked to create an open dialogue on divestment. While the ultimate goal of the campaign is to get fossil fuel companies out of Kenyon’s endowment, we hope that in the process we can create a new precedent of transparency between the administration and students. We want to work with the community to create viable solutions that keep our college financially stable while not benefiting from climate change. Such a respected institution as Kenyon should divest for its students, its greater community and the planet.TKO
“What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do” Aristotle
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