Random P&R thoughts and questions

That's just bizarre. Is she a Christian Scientist?

Reply back with just "she was in hospital ... she was healed."

I hate how patronizing missionary work inevitably seems to be (and often is, see the history of child sponsorship). Is it for the benefit of the recipient, or the missionary? Therein lies the rub.

I would love a show where some folks are brought from the third world to mission to folks in the west, either on their traditional religion or something ecological. Inverting those expectations would be awesome to watch.

I would most definitely watch this show if it were about an army of child soldiers deposited in the rural south.

It would be matched with 'Preppers, as you'd get to watch them freak out and go to ground!

I think the reasoning goes more like "god is all-powerful so he'll get his way whatever we do BUT if we try to act against his will it's a sin and possibly, depending on how much of a dick god is implicitly made up to be in our particular flavor of christianity, he'll hold it against us for up to 7 generations".
Not that it makes any sense, but you know, religion. To be fair a god with an unknowable plan is also kinda pointless, 'cause at that point you may do without a god entirely. Most reasonable folks believe in a god whose plan you sort of know but not in the details, but then the problem becomes, how do we draw the line between the known part of the plan and the unknown, and can we really assume the bible is a better source of knowledge about the plan than whatever your acquaintances pulled out of their asses?

Someone looks at some people who are suffering unbelievably as a result of where they chanced to be born and decides that what would help those people the most is some moralizing? Doesn't sound all that noble to me.

Good thread. Didn't know where to put this, since we don't appear to have an all catching "laugh at Fox"-thread:
Fox News Claims Solar Won't Work in America Because It's Not Sunny Like Germany

I believe Case is in California. Bet he'll be bummed to know how stupid his investment was. Had he only been in sunny Bavaria...

God's "plan" (also: God's "will") is a difficult concept for everyone, most of all Christians. Arguably the largest schism in Protestantism was the Calvinist/Armenian split which can be boiled down to whether or not things are pre-determined and so is there really a free will. There are other related difficulties as well: whether the plan/will of God is unknownable as you state or not, and contrasting an all-powerful God to the God who occasionally changes His mind.

The answer does not lie at either extreme: either those who basically reject everything and say God will heal if He wants, or those who think God can be summoned and must act by the force of prayer. There are literally dozens of illustrations that appear to fall somewhere in the middle: men and women who moved things by faith in their God, but which faith was active and powerful rather than passive and helpless. The Epistle of James is the great New Testament treatise on this kind of active faith (which is also interesting to me as it was one of the earliest NT epistles written), and that's one big reason I believe most Protestants don't like it very much: it claims that both extreme views are incorrect.

I end up feeling awkward about the whole premise of proselytizing missionaries. My parents were--and are--missionaries, and did mostly the community service type of thing, where you go out and try to materially improve people's lives in an active, physical, basic-needs sort of way. And they still ended up dealing with guilt over not being "real" missionaries, or the "best" kind of missionaries, because they were just, you know, improving transportation networks and moving around vital supplies and saving actual lives with medical transportation instead of Preaching The Word.

And then there's the whole thing where as a missionary kid I learned to find short-term missionaries irksome, because they fly in full of Benevolence From On High, use up a huge number of resources in the process, and waft out again feeling warm and fuzzy, when the cost of their plane tickets usually would've done more good than anything they accomplished personally on the whole trip there.

And then there was the time I went on a mission trip to another country in high school, with an organization that shipped teenagers around from the US for that express purpose, and they freaked me right the fuck out because when I got sick they wanted to Pray Me Healthy, and I was sitting there going, dudes, no, there is a reason all of the missionaries where I come from run a HOSPITAL, and it is not because it is a place where you pray real hard to cast out the demons of sickness, it's because it's a place where they give people antibiotics and antivenom and other useful things starting with anti-.

So. Man. I am kinda rambling in a personal sense, here? In that I think there are a lot of missionaries that do some really good and useful things, and there are a lot of missionaries that do some good things and some harmful things while having great intentions, and then there is...a certain set of missionaries where I really just wish they'd give the money to Doctors Without Borders instead of flying to another country for a month/summer/year if they aren't going to deploy some actual useful professional skills that couldn't be supplied locally in the process.

Why did they have to go all the way to Malawi to find poor black people?

Being a missionary, in the abstract, is about the missionary proving their faith through a trial. Exotic black people are a trial that you can deal with in the contained space of a foreign country and then come home from. If you take on the problems of the poor at home, then you are attacking the stability of the privilege that affords you with the resources to go overseas in the first place. In a way, the missionary is the purest rejection of doing what is right as a system and looking to substitute that with personal gestures, along the lines of Mitt Romney's "but I'm such a generous guy in person" thing. That's why reformers and missionaries are fundamentally different kinds of people. They both have a type of courage, but if you talk to many missionaries upon their return from the strange land of the other, you will often find that they have either changed completely in terms of who they are or successfully resisted reality and reinforced their preconceived notions. Unsurprisingly, it's typically the latter, and then they come home and continue to preach the gospel of wealth at the historically marginalized.

That's really not how it's presented with any of the missions I've ever had contact with.

I mean, I'm not saying that no missionaries see it that way. I'm sure there are some. There are probably even missionary organizations that frame it that way. But I do want to point out that based on my experience with missionaries from several different large organizations, any missionary going in saying "It's about proving my faith through trials and adversity!" would not even be let out onto the field until they had that viewpoint seriously corrected.

...of course, I'm also talking about career missionaries, here. Short-term missions are a whole different...thing. Which I could go on about at some length, but I'm refraining because I'm not really sure how much it's relevant to the original post; I'm going to feel very different about what this person is doing depending on whether they've committed to four weeks of this or four years, as short-term missions go.

Actually, let me edit this further. When I say "missionary" I'm thinking of someone who spent at least a few years training and preparing for going out and spending their entire life and career as missionaries somewhere. If other people here are saying "missionaries" and mean "someone who's spending a summer in another country doing mission work," that would go a long way towards explaining why I'm so baffled by some commentary.

The missionary-work noodling reminded me of this comment elsewhere about the inadvisability of unskilled volunteering-abroad. That thread was about disaster areas and war zones as opposed to missions in more peaceful times and places, but I think a lot of the core observations probably apply about the actual 'good' superficially well-meaning folks are able to provide. Namely that it's more often a burden quietly borne by those being "helped" and there are much better ways for the privileged to go about such things.

*head-tilts*

I...uh. I'm not parsing extarbags' comment, but I gather it means I should step out of the conversation because I am distracting from the topic instead of contributing? Sorry about that, if so.

Pretty sure it was just a joke, albeit a somewhat pointed one depending on how personal this topic is to you. I just have an automatic positive reaction to early modern Spain mentions, so I'm sorry if that was offensive. I'm still working on my response to you, fwiw, just busy at the moment. But, no, from where I'm sitting yours was an appropriate response.

I went to Spain for a summer to take Spanish language classes as a teen and a couple in my class were American missionaries. I never did ask them what church they were working for but I did go WTF?! at the idea of missionaries in Spain of all places.

Naw, just something that tickled me. I think most Americans or maybe just most coastal ones are primarily familiar with the self-aggrandizing short-term style of mission, so the lifelong version seems like something from colonial times, or at least that's how it struck me. That's not to minimize your or yours' experience of course; obviously whatever you say about it is accurate or at least more so than whatever I could manage. But the joke popped into my head and struck me funny.

Oh, okay. I just didn't get the joke! Sorry for the fussing.

How personal the topic is for me is...hm. An interesting point. It is personal in the sense that my parents are missionaries, and so I do get uncomfortable when things run into the "All missionaries are horrible self-centered people doing horrible things" direction, as it does in some places. Especially because I can point to a lot of things they've done that have quite significantly improved the lives of others in material, secular ways. And having seen some conversations on "these missionaries suck" turn into "All missionaries should be murdered"--and I am not exaggerating there--I get sensitive in that area.

At the same time, I am aware that missionaries--career or otherwise--have done some really amazingly horrible things over the course of history, and some of them are still messing things up. And I have a quiet personal hate-on for short-term missions, with some very select caveats (involving things like professional medical expertise that is demonstrably not available in the area being visited), because even when I was a starry-eyed child in the "All missionaries are awesome!" mode, I thought that the vast majority of short-term missions were Not Hurting Anything, I Guess as the absolute best point they could hit, and usually much, much worse.

Even more than the condescending approaches or interference with local relief efforts by people who have the expertise, it's the damn airfare that gets me every time. I look at how expensive it is to fly someone to another continent--all other expenses aside--and then consider just how much more help the cost of those tickets could've been... Especially when people fly to another continent to do something like, say, help build a school! ...which could've been done by paying local laborers a good local wage, thus pouring the money into the local economy while getting the exact same work done. And I end up frothing. If what someone really wants is a vacation, they shouldn't kid themselves about how they're "going on a mission" just because they dig a ditch for a few hours while they're there.

So, yeah, it is kinda personal. But not, I hope, the sort of personal where I get defensive about criticism where it's due. And it certainly sounds due in the original post.

Thanks for explaining that further, fadeaccompli.

That's certainly part of it, but I think there's a bigger divide than just that one. My comment is derived from a tradition in history and anthropology that addresses human institutions, even those (perhaps especially those)
premised around the supernatural, in strictly secular terms. Some of that is most nearly connected to the Marxist (in terms of history) notion of superstructure, but a lot of this kind of analysis has roots going back to the Enlightenment in Europe and beyond, not to mention a place in a number of other traditions. The point is that it addresses human actions in terms of incentives that can be secularized, quantified, and put in terms that fit anthropological and historical patterns rather than ones that exist "beyond" them because of a god. What that means is that you would take, for instance, the auto-da-fé in its many forms not as a communion between a man and his god, but rather as a ritual that expresses fealty or at least acceptance of authority relative to the human hierarchy that enforces the act.

This is as controversial as any other methodology, not just in terms of Christians but for any analysis of mystical or religious motivations. Indeed, it is one of the fundamental roadblocks in trying to come up with effective ways of historicizing people who did not leave their own records (ie illiterates, peoples whose records were destroyed or unintelligible), as if you come up with a strictly rational framework for people that self-described in mystical terms, it's really hard to know what was metaphor and what was literally believed. With people who do write about themselves, the problem doesn't really get any easier because taking them at their word has plenty of its own problems, and in the end you remain "insincere" in how you are assessing the faith component of their religion.

The second part, and rest assured this is going to be even more broadly controversial than the last, is that I don't believe in altruism. I know the term exists, but I don't believe it is useful as a category to explain human motivations on a systemic scale. That is, we can all point to an individual that does something that is most easily explained as altruism, and you can even link up a bunch of unrelated events (say a bunch of people taking a bullet for someone else) and say altruism is a useful way to connect A to B. But I believe it falls apart as an explanation for institutions and systems that regularly produce "altruistic" conduct, and that you have to keep digging until you get to a functional incentive that actually explains the behavior.

What this means in terms of missionaries gets messier, because as a secularist who views the flavors of belief as unimportant as compared to their material consequences, I don't accept the inherent value of the primary "good" they are there to dispense out of the assumption that people from radically different backgrounds and contexts need their god. It's nice when they go there *and* do material good for others as well, whether it's vaccines or schools, but it's colored by their self interest in propagating their faith and asserting their own contributions to it just as surely as infrastructure built by an invading empire. So rather than viewing their desire to "save" others as a justification, in the abstract to me it essentially tarnishes the enterprise and adds strings to it that are tied to the most valuable thing a person has, namely their sense of self and that of the people they love.

That doesn't go into particular behavior or misbehavior by missionaries. My family has a number of them, including what I would call "domestic" missionaries who pursue local poverty in the same spirit, and without exception they are mostly decent to others and have done a fair number of good deeds. But without the fundamental incentive of getting themselves to heaven or further glorifying their sense of god through the mission being removed from their actions (by a hypothetical re-write of their religious texts, for instance), the logic is always going to circle back to what makes them tick rather than what they presume is best for people that are completely unlike them.

Again, I think it's important to treat it as a spectrum of behavior, just as I would with businesses or non governmental organizations or militaries or any other human organization or institution, rather than a good/bad binary. And I'm not going after individuals. And that's probably way more than anyone wants to read in one post.

tl;dr A lot of that is more directly relevant to academicized discussions of missionaries than ones between believers and unbelievers, where you're going to run into a lot of misunderstandings that are going to render the whole thing a pointless mess. But I do think pulling the motivations driving professions like those of missionaries out of the insulated context of fellow believers makes for a useful conversation.

I've got a friend who has spent the past year in South Sudan.

She's not there doing missionary work though. She's helping eradicate guinea worm. She was also present for the final push in Ghana.

So, spread Jesus or eliminate disease? Why can't missionaries at least do something in addition to proselytizing? I can't imagine that is very helpful considering the rather tumultuous spread of Islam through many parts of Africa.

You used the wrong word here, right?

Just want to be sure I'm not misreading your posts.

I do think that is an interesting discussion of how you're looking at things! Even if I don't agree with all particulars, it's really useful to see where you're coming from there.

That is generally my position on things. My views on this sort of thing have certainly changed over the years, but there is a certain set of memories--not precise ones, but built up out of a lot of similar incidents--from my early childhood that sort of crystalize how I look at short-term missions.

Every few months, groups of people from the United States would come through on short-term "missions" in the area where I lived. They would help pour some concrete or the like, always stuff that local people (who depended on that for their livelihoods) could've done just as well. They'd go on a lot of fun touristy trips. And they'd stop at the cute little missionary school full of cute little missionary kids, and we'd all get hauled into the main room for a special chapel, where we'd sing our cute little songs, with a dozen pasty white folks standing by one wall, filming us singing. I asked why in the world they spent all that money to come all the way there just to film us, and why didn't they just donate money? Why disrupt class for tourists? Well, I was told, this way they felt like they were really contributing, and they would go back home and continue donating to the missions--and the missionaries--and the missionaries who did actual work down there, because of that feeling of Kinship and the like.

About once a year, or every two years, a group of doctors sponsored by some mission organization would come through. They'd fly out to the various villages with no road access, and do a lot of medical care while they were there: diagnosis, show how to work out some better sanitation methods, follow-up care, vaccinations, that sort of thing. Each missionary family would have one or two of them in a guest room and over for a few dinners, but we didn't see much of them at all. After all, they were there to get work done, and they didn't have a lot of time or interest for watching missionary kids sing songs, or tubing down rivers, or any of that stuff, when there was medical care to be distributed.

Whenever I think of short term missions, I think of those two groups. I don't know a lot of short-term missions that fall into the latter group, but those at least I have some damn respect for.

Yes, definitely.

It's pretty well accepted amongst economists that cash transfers are generally superior to in-kind aid. This would indicate that your average summer missionary would make the intended recipients of her good works better off by just cutting them a check while she goes to the beach, rather than doing missionary work. I'd imagine that for professional missionaries (those who do that sort of work for a living, as well as those who have relevant special skills like e.g., doctors) the calculus is quite different, as their own skills and whatnot significantly increase what they can offer in terms of time vs. cash.

So just to abuse this thread, as I don't think this is worth a thread of its own: http://www.actionplan.gc.ca/en/page/phasing-out-penny
Canada is phasing out the penny.

I hope the U.S. does this soon, I hate pennies.

A fair warning for those who are liking my post: most economists would probably rather sit on a beach rather than go on a mission, so it's plausible that the alignment of economic theory with their preferences is no coincidence. :)

Pretty much.

And the shorter the mission, the more the balance tips towards Give Money. It costs the same amount to fly two missionaries and their kids off to a country to stay there for four years as it does to fly that many people to the country for a two-week trip. And the longer someone stays in the country, the better (...ideally) they get at navigating local customs and preferences, seeing where need actually exists, working with existing local infrastructure, and so forth.

The missionary hospital full of doctors and nurses from the US, working to provide medical care on a need-based sliding scale to people who otherwise couldn't afford it, and spending decades doing just that, is a completely different proposition from a bunch of tourists spending four weeks in another country being condescending and passing out tracts. Like the difference between my geology teacher, who wrote the textbook I worked from--such a good textbook I didn't sell it back after the class--and one of those self-published "The truth about dinosaurs inside the hollow earth!" books you can get on Amazon.

My neighbors are Mormon. Their twin boys were split up on their missions with one going to Finland and one going to Bosnia. I don't think I would want to go to Bosnia to teach about Mormonism.

Man, that is so deliciously tone-deaf.

This is the best/worst thing!
https://twitter.com/search?q=#PoliSciValentines&src=typd

Senate Democrats will never find 60 votes to end my love for you. #poliscivalentines

— Seth Masket (@smotus) February 14, 2013

@maluflores: May our love last longer than agreements between politicians and voters in a non-reelection scenario #poliscivalentines #mexico

— Hiram Valdez (@hiram_valdez) February 15, 2013

You're like most published studies. A positive finding and impossible to replicate. #PoliSciValentines

— Erik Gahner Larsen (@erikgahner) February 14, 2013

Those are great.

I might say I’m independent, but I’m really leaning toward you. #PoliSciValentines

— Andrew Therriault (@therriaultphd) February 14, 2013

I'd gerrymander any district to stay the representative of your heart. #Poliscivalentines

— Elizabeth (@eakarle) February 14, 2013

I never heard of this Prenda Law* firm before today but this is, IMO, the money quote from the link:

*Gist: Law firm finds people that download porn, and offers them a settlement or else they expose that they download porn (via suing them).

Do you have links to anything on this?

Take an intermediate micro class; you'll hit the principle pretty early on when considering budget lines. Or click this link.

The underlying principle: individuals will spend their budget to maximize their utility. The best you can possibly do with an in-kind transfer of x dollars is get an individual to the same level of utility he'd have achieved on his own with an extra x dollars in cash (this assumes your in-kind transfer precisely matches the individual's preferences). However it's very possible to get an individual to a point below where he'd be with an x dollar cash transfer. Therefore, superiority of cash.

Note there are all sorts of assumptions embedded in this analysis; if they don't hold it may no longer be true.

It's important to stress that it's rare to see advocacy for unrestricted cash transfers. Most of the "in practice" forms of this kind of thing that seem to deliver results are in constrained formats with checks and balances that are not viewed as a substitute or replacement for inadequate government infrastructure. So, we get the current variety of microlending with all sorts of conditions, but the idea is that the fundamental idea of having individual creativity and knowledge of their situation drive the use of money is still in place.I think microfinance generally provides good examples of the advantages this kind of thing offers.

In terms of "infrastructure" questions, you see it with charities themselves; with rare exception, they all prefer cash so that they can accurately adapt to the needs of the situation at hand, which is where you typically see an organization taking on what would elsewhere be a government function.

To me, it seems like the mediation of third parties, missionaries and nonprofits alike, has exactly the sort of expertise limits that jeffd described. You do want doctors allotting medicine, usually, but stimulating a local economy is an altogether different proposition. More importantly, a lot of the ideas about who can best determine investments in developing countries are born of longstanding prejudices and paternalism.

Generally speaking, though, I think microcredit and the like are important steps to take at the bottom. But they are nothing compared to the amount that developing countries would benefit if the systemic international-level exploitation by multinationals and theft/capital flight by local elites was slowed or halted; returning a tiny percentage of that in aid does nothing to address the big picture. In the former case, forcing companies to pay taxes at the places they have to be across borders (without replacing the current mess with true double taxation, but rather international tax sharing) would do a lot; in the latter case, you'd have to crush the same offshoring that victimizes the majority in developed countries as well, so win/win. Until that day, of course, small bandaids in the form of more efficient cash transfers will have to do.