The Right Sort of Laughter

Taking advantage of COVID isolation to finish some reading, including Nidesh Lawtoo's The Phantom of the Ego (Hopkins 2013).  This work focuses on the idea of mimesis as it was developed by several modern writers (Nietzsche, Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Bataille) as the force that drives the formation of self and society.  I wrote some initial thoughts here in December.  One idea that runs through the discussion of mimesis is the role of sacrificial violence in forming community, that communities form around the shared experience of directing violence at some "other," a scapegoat. I had some trouble with that--I always associated community with something good and comforting. 

I missed this before, but in this book Lawtoo ends up offering a way out, which is to distinguish between the mimesis of violence and the mimesis of laughter--that there are infectious experience that bind people in positive ways.  He also points to the affective connection between child and mother as another example of a positive sharing.  Give it a thought, and you can see if everywhere, even in something as mundane as advice on public speaking, where you start with a joke to make a connection with the crowd (still crowd psychology). I know I feel much more connected with people when we are laughing, and with the people who are quick to laugh. 

One caveat is that Donald Trump's crowds share laughter as well as anger.  He invokes the mimesis of violence when he gets a crowd to chant "lock her up" or invites the crowd to turn on journalists, and laughter when he makes jokes about his rivals.  I don't know if Hitler made jokes, but I can imagine he might.  But Trump for sure taps many possible sources of contagious identification.  

All laughter is not the same, nor are all jokes.  My step child much prefers comedy over drama, and watches lots of stand up specials.  We'll watch them together sometimes, and some of them work for me, others don't.  At one point it dawned on me that I much prefer comedians who make fun of themselves or their group, and that comedians making jokes about others strike me as sour and unfunny.  Trump's cracks are always about others, designed to distinguish him and his crowd from others. His only moments of self-deprecation are hollow feints.

I don't know if the distinction between self-identifying and other-directed humor can be maintained firmly or distinguished absolutely in all cases. I'm not sure I believe anything in life has a firm boundary, certainly not something rooted in language.  A parent can make jokes about being a parent, but what about making joke about your child. Parents are so thoroughly implicated in their children's lives that maybe it always has an element of the joking self.  The joke about the kid is often really a joke about the parent's reaction to the kids, or about how much they feel inadequate to their role as parent.  What about with spouses?  That seems like an area that can creep over into sourness, but where maybe the best jokes make fun of the spouse making the joke.   

Article on Accounting and Legitimacy in Hatfield School journal

 I had my first peer-reviewed paper published in the Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs: Accounting's Problematic Relationship to Legitimacy.  The article is a little dense--I really should have used section headings--but it contains one set of the building blocks for work I've been doing since. 

Embedded labor value in the Bible

At church today, in our session on Christianity and co-ops, we read a passage from James 5

Come now, you rich, week and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. (James 5:1-4, RSV)

What's fascinating to me in this passage is that it basically describes the way the labor of workers is inscribed in goods and wealth, and that whatever exploitation occurred is fully captured there.  It may not be visible--it looks like a pile of gold and silver, but James looks at it and "behold," sees the hours put in, the wages associated with those hours, and the surplus value extracted or held back. 

This puts me in mind of alternate accountings.  Accounting measures value, and part of value is the effort put into production of the goods or service by people, the residue of the total value they produced less what was paid out to them.  Conventional accounting does not show this, but converts everything to dollars and cents which are abstracted from the physical value and physical conditions of the creation of value. 

I'm finally reading Tony Tinker's Paper Prophets, considered the origin for emancipatory accounting more fully elaborated by Sonja Gallhofer and Jim Haslam in Accounting and Emancipation.  Tinker describes several examples of alternate accountings provided by Ernst Mandel in his Treatise on Marxist Economics: a blacksmith caste in an Indian village which has land holdings and requires outsider who want their services to work the land for a number of hours equivalent to the time required to make the object they need; a Middle Ages Japanese village with a system of cooperative agriculture where villagers balance accounts with each other based on labor time; and a couple of others where the accounting system measures labor time. 

Tinker's point is that these aspects of the good or service can be tracked and made visible. Burchell, Clubb and Hopwood's landmark 1985 article discussed a time when conventional accounting moved in that direction by adding statements on value-added to financial reports (a short-lived experiment in Britain wiped out by the arrival of Thatcher). To me, the writer of the epistle was seeing through the surface of the treasure hoard to not just the effort put in, but the trauma and injustice there.  That would be go a step further, and I think Tinker does get there, I just haven't gotten that far in the book. 

This passage in the Bible would lead you not just to account for the effort put in, but to capture the qualitative, spiritual and moral dimensions of the hour of effort.  Was the labor hour one produced by a prisoner, a slave, or someone asked to work at danger to themselves?  This seems technically doable.  Not sure where you'd get a chance to give it a try and see what it ends up looking like.  

 

Burchell, S., Clubb, C., & Hopwood, A. G. (1985). Accounting in its social context: Towards a history of value added in the United Kingdom. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 10(4), 381–413

Gallhofer, S. & Haslam, J. (2003). Accounting and Emancipation: Some Critical Interventions (1st ed., Vol. 3). Routledge

Tony Tinker (1985). Paper Prophets: A Social Critique of Accounting.

The Sacred Canopy and the Bankruptcy of Religion

Sometime in the Summer of maybe 2019, in what was a different era in my professional life and for all of us, I started on a project to look into ideas of de-growth and low growth economics. Among the books I assigned myself was Tim Jackson's Prosperity Without Growth. Jackson is a British economist working on sustainable economics. I gather he's got a pretty high profile--Prince Charles wrote the foreword to the book. I started the book, it didn't catch me up too much, started a Ph.D. program, etc. But I finally went back and finished it this week.

The main reason to go back to this was because we're doing a study in church on co-op economics with our pastor's husband who is working on the idea through the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Their basic hypothesis is that there is a deep connection between Christianity and cooperative economics. 

After going through quite a bit of analysis about the grip a growth imperative has on society and economics, and its detrimental effects, Jackson arrives at a vision of an economic focused on service to others--really care for other--rather than on throughput of materials. Then we talks about where we can see this sort of economy:

Perhaps surprisingly, the seeds for such a transformation already exist, often in local, community-based initiatives or in social enterprise: community energy projects, local farmers' markets, slow food cooperatives, sports clubs, libraries, community health and fitness centres, local repair and maintenance services, craft workshops, writings centres, outdoor pursuits, music and drama, yoga, martial arts, mediation, gardening, the restoration of parks and open spaces. (p 143)

The list is probably peculiar in several ways--it includes forms of organization and general activities for one thing--but for now note that it does not include churches.  Which exist in create number, involve great numbers of people, and should be about service to others. 

Then to explain what it would take to move from a society of growth and affluence to one that defines prosperity as "the ability to flourish as human beings" (p 212) he talks about the need for a framework that gives meaning and identity, and "relates our temporal existence to some higher 'sacred' order" (p 214).  Money and goods have become that in a consumer society, and do a very poor job of providing that spiritual and psychological support and ground. You would expect religion to come in here, but not for Jackson:

Religion may offer some defence against his threat [of a meaningless void that threatened to overturn our hopes and derail our best intentions]. But what should a society do, when religious belief is harder to come by? Or when its intellectual foundations have been shaken? Or when its manifestation entails increasingly fundamentalist (and inhuman) ideals? Is it so unlikely to suppose that some of these vital social functions are taken on by consumerism itself? (p 214)

So for Jackson, religion doesn't have credibility.  It's not really worth considering.  Contrary to the argument in our Sunday program, churches aren't prime examples of a service and care economy,  I do in fact disagree with that, and for me churches leap out as organizations Jackson should look at.  It could be that he's in England, and maybe he just thinks of the Church of England and its large bureaucracy--but then again, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, blurbed Jackson's book.

While I see the promise in making this connection, I do wonder if the church has damaged itself so much that it cannot play this role outside of a small band of devotees, and that it cannot form the basis for large numbers of people to change their relationship to growth and consumption.  The church broadly defined does shoot itself in the foot regularly, and has significant branches that stake out position that aggressively feed the fires of dead-end consumption.  There's some groups out there trying to make different connections, but at this point I don't know if we're talking about a handful of people with Twitter accounts, or something with more and growing tendrils. Can they build enough muscle to take religion out of bankruptcy? 

Tim Jackson (2017). Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow (2nd ed).