One paper I wrote shortly after attempting to read Derrida was about conversion and the binary between internal and external reasons. Internal reasons are one for which an agent has something in his or her subjective motivational set, some desire or inclination, that gives him or her motivation to act. An external reason has no such component in the agent’s subjective motivational set, so while the agent may recognize the logical validity of the external reason, he or she has no reason to act on it. Here is the pertinent argument:

McDowell’s counterexample of conversion is similar to Williams’s example of the reluctant soldier. In both cases, the agent is initially unmotivated to do something which others in his social group thought he should do. Williams solves the problem of the soldier’s change of heart by saying his internal reasons changed through deliberation. McDowell proposes that the community standards which define an “ethical upbringing” and “suitable modes of behaviour” (McDowell 101) are the way of ‘considering the matter aright,’ and that through conversion, and agent may come to accept reasons which had previously been external to him. McDowell does this to establish the existence of external reasons. But if the reason is external, in that the motivation to act based on it came from the community rather than the individual, and if the reason becomes internal through conversion, that reason is at once both external and internal. Instead of only making room for the existence of external reasons, McDowell has proven the slipperiness of these categories. His conversion example can be taken a step further to show that the binary of internal and external reasons is a false dichotomy. The binary between internal and external reasons is broken as soon as an external reason is accepted as an internal reason by an agent. Instead of only one or the other, a reason will fall on a continuum, at some point on an internal to external reason axis. A reason may be both internal and external, with differing degrees of motivation for the agent.

Note the “slipperiness of categories” and the “false dichotomy.” Oh, this post-structuralism was heady stuff!

But as under the influence of any intoxicating concoction, my inebriated brilliance did not stand up to sober scrutiny. My professor did not accept my slippery categories or broken binaries. My inspired continuum was rejected in favor of the original definitions made by real philosophers, and the good doctor was not be moved beyond them. He stayed securely within the box, and I, deflated, and dependent on him for my grade, packed my slippery categories back away and excised them from the next draft of the paper.

It didn’t hurt the paper to drop that fun little contradiction, that brilliant logical twist. Because really, it wasn’t that brilliant. It was not even original. Sadly, I must confess it was the shoddy work of a script kiddie, not the elegant script of a true hacker. I’m not a real post-structuralist, remember? I can’t even claim understand post-structuralism.

The destruction of the binary using self-contradiction and deconstructive post-structuralist techniques is just a trick, a clever little game that means nothing and everything at the same time. It is as pointless to use in an argument as an appeal to authority; in either situation, the person deploying one of these tactics is doing so to shut down the discussion. Neither move is constructive. With post-structuralists there is at least a playful recognition of their counter-productiveness. Yes, they are throwing the chessmen off of the board; it’s because they realize it is an empty game. Look, they say, see the fantastic pattern of the scattered fall. Generally those who appeal to authority have is no such light hearted self-awareness; instead there is earnestness or closemindedness or some combination of the two. They have no sense of levity and would be insulted to be accused of participating in mere game.

I may be too timid to ever be a real post-structuralist. I am no superman. But I am willing, here and there, to call out the games I play for the games that they are, even if I have to deny some authority in the process. And so I say to Derrida, So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Adams, Douglas. So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish. Del Rey. 1985.
McDowell, John. “Might There Be External Reasons?” Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. 95-111.
Whipple, Rachel. “Implications of Conversion for the Internal/External Reason Binary.” Unpublished student paper for Philosophy 413. 2012. And yes, I know it’s unreadable.
Williams, Bernard. “Internal and external reasons.” Moral Luck: Philosophical papers 1973-1980. Cambridge University Press, 1982. 101-11.

[Disclaimer: In what follows I offer a brief phenomenological sketch of human intimacy. Read on at your own peril.]

In chapter 12 on “Immutability and Impassibility” in The Attributes of God, Ostler claims that: “In the view I am proposing here, the ultimate moral criteria is the intrinsic value of creativity exemplified in its highest form in personality realized in full personhood” (386). Or again, taking Martin Buber’s phenomenological analysis of “I/Thou” versus “I/It” ways of relating to other people as a frame, Ostler says:

The highest good consists precisely in the relationship that is created between two persons who fully and properly value each other through entering into relation with one another. This relationship is accomplished precisely in entering into the emotional life of the other so that the “other” enters into the shared life of the lover. God enters into this relation constituted as a Thou by taking our very experience and value into his life. God penetrates our being and envelops us in his being. He allows us to enter into him and become a part of his experience just as he enters and induces, to the extent we value him and accept his love, sublime unity and joy.

The most analogous human experience is the intimate agape united with eros of husband and wife in sexual union. The spouse who is properly valued in the relationship is a source of greatest value and the most extreme pleasure and satisfaction known to mortals; but a spouse who is used as a mere thing in such an intimate relationship is a whore. (386)

I think Ostler is on to something here, but I wonder if, in general, we’re not still too Platonic (in all applicable senses of the word) and/or too German-Romantic, in our discussions of sex.

Does sex – in all its raw emotional, material, and spiritual intimacy – really involve bodies as vanishing points for the reciprocal interpenetration of two free subjects? If I am clearly both a subject (a “Thou”) and an object (an “It”), does sex unfold as the union of two increasingly transparent Thou’s?

I wonder if we’d be better off inverting the frame.

Granted the profound intimacy of sacred sex, what is the character of this intimacy? What is the most obvious thing we can say about sex?

Sex (especially sex as sacrament) is about bodies and aspects of bodies.

Take pornography as a counterpoint. From the perspective of consumption, the problem with pornography is not that it involves too much flesh, too much objectification, too much materiality. The problem with pornography is that it disconnects sex from the difficulty and demands of real bodies and substitutes air-brushed spectacle instead. Pornography is spectral and it is consumed by ghosts.

Being a body, being human is not simple. We are objects, not just subjects. And our bodies, as objects, vastly exceed the grasp of our subjectivity. A defining phenomenological feature of my lived experience of my own flesh is its strangeness, its opacity, its willfulness, its quasi-autonomy.

What’s to be done?

Sex, it seems to me, is that one place where we jointly confront, negotiate, and celebrate precisely this being-body, this being-more-than-a-subject. The intimacy of sex hinges on the intimacy of a shared confession that we both are bodies and that these bodies we share are, even to ourselves, a mystery.

In sex, we are smack at the intersection of divine purposes we don’t quite understand and a blind animal drive 3.5 billion years in the making. In sex, we are two Thou’s joined in the intimacy of a shared It.

Practicing intimacy, do you find the other person’s thoughts and desires and feelings growing increasingly transparent, obvious, accessible? Or do you find instead that the intimacy spreads from a common willingness to trust in both the opaque mystery of the other’s body and your own?

Is sex an emptying of the body’s opacity? Or a joint emptying of selves into the opacity of these bodies?

Sacred sex is sacred because, in all material tenderness, it allows our It-ness to actually take center stage.

Or so it seems to me.

With respect to theology, we might then ask two related questions:

1. If Ostler is right that sacred sex is as close as mortals analogously get to divine union, then is the centrality of our intertwined but opaque bodies an accidental feature of this sexual intimacy, a feature that will eventually be purified and rendered translucent in divine light? Or is this dark matter essential to sex being what it is?

2. Further, on what basis should we decide what’s accidental and what’s essential to this intimacy? Scripture? Metaphysics? Phenomenology? Biology? All of the above? Which in light of which?

While gay marriage has garnered headlines, polygamy or plural marriage is waiting in the wings. Every few years a polygamy case works its way through Utah courts and then quietly goes away. The latest case might not go so quietly: Brown v. Herbert, filed July 13, 2011 in federal court in Utah. Defendants filed a 12b1 motion to dismiss for lack of standing. On February 3, 2012 the court issued a Memorandum Decision and Order granting the motion as to two of the defendants (the Governor and Attorney General of Utah, both in their official capacities) but denying the motion as to the County Attorney of Utah County. So the case will go forward and Plaintiffs (the Brown family featured in the TV series Sister Wives) will have a chance to present their case in federal court.

And what is their argument? “Plaintiffs have filed this case to challenge Utah Code Ann. § 76-7-101 … as unconstitutional and enjoining its enforcement.” (Memorandum Decision, page 1.) Here is the text of Utah Code § 76-7-101, the anti-bigamy statute, included in the Utah Criminal Code under the suggestive classification “Offenses Against the Family”:

(1) A person is guilty of bigamy when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person.
(2) Bigamy is a felony of the third degree.
(3) It shall be a defense to bigamy that the accused reasonably believed he and the other person were legally eligible to remarry.

Notice the wording “purports to marry another person.” Under common law (and most modern criminal law derives from common law) the first marriage was valid but a purported second marriage was void. Technically, there was no second marriage, which raised tricky issues for prosecuting bigamy (Second marriage? What second marriage?). Modernly, licensing statutes accomplish a similar result. Utah Code § 30-1-7: “No marriage may be solemnized in this state without a license issued by the county clerk of any county of this state.” And you can’t get a license for a concurrent second marriage, hence any attempted second marriage will not be recognized by the state, either because no marriage license was granted or because one was obtained fraudulently. Thus the second clause in the first paragraph of § 76-7-101, “… or cohabits with another person.” That simplifies prosecution but, this being the year 2012, cohabitation as a basis for criminal liability may be problematic. Can the government still hold consenting adults (in any number and in any configuration of sexes or genders) criminally liable simply for living together? If it isn’t a crime for a guy to live with his girlfriend, is it a crime for a guy to live with two girlfriends? Or with a wife and two girlfriends? Will a court in 2012 be willing to make that distinction, or will it throw out the Utah statute as uncontitutional?

However, ruling the statute unconstitutional raises other constitutional issues. Here is Article 3, Section 1 of the Utah Constitution:

Perfect toleration of religious sentiment is guaranteed. No inhabitant of this State shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship; but polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited.

So the constitutionality of the statute raises the issue of the constitutionality of this clause in the Utah State Constitution. Furthermore, it was Congress that required that clause to be included in the Utah Constitution when it approved statehood for Utah in the Utah Enabling Act of 1894. Here is the langauge from the Act directing provisions to be included in the constitution to be drafted for the future State of Utah:

The Constitution shall be republican in form, and make no distinction in civil or political rights on account of race or color, except as to Indians not taxed, and not to be repugnant to the Constitution of the United States and the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And said Convention shall provide, by ordinance irrevocable without the consent of the United States and the people of said State

First. That perfect toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured, and that no inhabitant of said State shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship: Provided, That polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited.

So it is not simply a matter of Utah amending its state constitution to conform with a possible opinion by the federal district court (as possibly affirmed by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court). Utah may be prohibited from amending its constitution without the permission of Congress.

Which brings us to the final section of the Memorandum Decision, in which the court states that “notice will be given to the United States to determine if it wishes to intervene” in the case. That section also references an October 28, 2011 Order to Show Cause why “the United States should not be joined as a required party due to its interest in Utah’s prohibition of polygamous or plural marriages as a condition for granting statehood, as stated in the Utah Enabling Act of 1894.” (Memorandum Decision, page 20.)

I don’t know that the United States can really dodge this issue, but either position raises difficult questions. Would the United States defend the statute and the Utah Constitution, arguing that mere cohabitation in certain arrangements, but not others, is still criminally liable? Or would the United States decline to defend the statute, opening the door not only to officially tolerated plural cohabitation (which may be the de facto case already, except in Utah County) but also to legal plural marriage? This touches not only plural marriage as presently practiced by Mormon fundamentalists but also Islamic polygamy presently if quietly practiced in the United States (see articles here and here for a quick introduction). All this, with two presidential candidates who each have polygamy in their family histories.

It is still possible this case will, like previous cases, end quietly. The court could yet find the issue moot, and dismiss the entire case, if Utah County officials credibly state they will not, now or ever, prosecute the Browns for violating the statute, despite apparent public statements to the contrary. But fairly strong language in the Memorandum Decision suggests the court will not entertain that argument, and Plaintiffs seem intent on having the case heard on the merits. This may not be the last time you read about Brown v. Herbert.

As in past years, I’ve compiled some of the data and made many comparisons in a spreadsheet on Google Docs. That spreadsheet includes church-wide information reported since 1973, along with a number of calculations that I’ve made based on the data. Those who are likewise interested in these statistics are welcome to look at it—and anyone wishing to  help maintain, update and improve both the data an the analysis can drop me a message (at Kent [at] timesandseasons [dot] org), and I’ll allow them access to modify the spreadsheet. I also have additional data that looks at regions around the world, and I’m reporting on some of that data for the first time this year.

Here is what I found interesting this year:

• Overall improvement in growth: In 2002 the number of missionaries dropped suddenly, and the number of converts also dropped, presumably because of the drop in missionaries. Until that time the number of missionaries serving had increased basically every year, often by more than 5% a year! This decrease is probably due to demographics—U.S. (and especially inter-mountain west) birthrates had declined a couple of decades earlier, and proportionally fewer missionaries came from the increasing proportion of members outside of the U.S.While the lower birthrate and rate of missionary service meant fewer missionaries initially, eventually the number of missionaries serving should begin to grow again. And, while the number of converts has slowly increased during the last decade, the number of missionaries has stayed level until this year, when it finally increased. I don’t know if this means that the number of missionaries will continue to increase, overcoming the drop caused by lower birthrates, or if it will take longer for the overall number of missionaries to increase in proportion with the number of members. But, the increase this year does look promising, and may lead to faster growth in coming years.
  

  Please note that the line for missionaries above is graphed on the left axis (the one that goes from 40,000 to 90,000) and that it excludes amounts below 40,000, which may make the changes seem a little larger than otherwise. The line for convert baptisms is graphed on the right axis (which goes from 100,000 to 400,000) and excludes amounts below 100,000, also making the changes seem a little larger than otherwise.
• Increasing size of Wards and Branches comes from outside U. S. and Canada:In past years I’ve worried about the continuing increase in the average size of wards and branches (up from 391 in 1984 to 502 at the end of 2011), which is apparently due to increasing inactivity. This year I compared the average size of wards and branches and stakes and districts in the U.S. and Canada to those same units elsewhere. The results were startling:

  

  Please note that the lines for wards and branches above are graphed on the right axis (the one that goes from 400 to 800) and that it excludes amounts below 400, which may make the changes seem a little larger than otherwise. The line for stakes and districts is graphed on the left axis (which goes from 0 to 4,500).

The average number of members per ward/branch is basically the same in the U.S. and Canada as it was nearly a decade ago, but outside the U.S. and Canada, the number has grown dramatically. To me this means that the change in activity rates happening in the Church isn’t due to any drop off in how faithful member of the Church in the U.S. are — instead it is due to the difficulties retaining members elsewhere. [I now feel justified in my skepticism of claims that significant numbers of Church members in the U.S. are becoming less active -- if the numbers were truly significant, the average number of members per ward would rise over the long run. The increase in inactivity appears to be all outside of the U.S. and Canada.]

Most surprising in my comparison of data from the U.S. and Canada to that of the rest of the world is that the growth in active members (measured by the growth in number of wards and branches) is actually higher in the U.S. and Canada than elsewhere! From 2002 to 2010 the number of wards and branches in the U.S. and Canada increased from 12,346 to 14,071, an increase of 14% or 1.65% a year. In contrast, the number of wards and branches outside the U.S. and Canada increased from 13,797 to 14,589, and increase of 5.75% (0.7% a year) — less than half the rate of growth in the U.S. and Canada.

In contrast, the growth rate in baptized members outside the U.S. and Canada is double that of members in these two countries. Why? I don’t think it is about missionary work — I suspect that missionary work is done the same whether in the U.S. and Canada or not. More likely, the reason lies with the many social and cultural factors that help people stay in the Church. Elsewhere, these factors are still developing, and are often not there when they are needed.

At least, that’s my theory for why. What’s yours?

Before I look at that sentence, though, a couple disclaimers. First, I haven’t been to Utah in at least four years. As far as I know, the City Creek development plans hadn’t been developed yet.[fn1] Second, I can’t convince myself to care about City Creek. I’m neither from Utah, nor do I live there.[fn2] I don’t know the flow of Salt Lake, so I don’t have any idea if this development complements or ruins the city.[fn3]

In her piece, Jana says:

Moreover, such profits [from the sale of condos and lease of retail space] are tax-exempt.

To support that claim, she links to this KUTV story. That didn’t feel right to me, so I thought I’d run down the claim. And, it turns out, City Creek Reserve, Inc. (“CCRI”) may well not be taxable on rents it receives from retail tenants.[fn4] But the KUTV story doesn’t give us a good sense of why. So here’s what I can piece together:

You can read CCRI’s 2009 Business Income Tax Return here. Among other things, it tells us that, like the Church and the university for which I work, CCRI is a 501(c)(3) organization and, as such, is generally exempt from paying taxes.[fn5]

There are two big exceptions to this tax exemption, and those two exceptions apply to all 501(c)(3) organizations. First, if a tax-exempt organization borrows money to fund an investment, it will pay taxes on a portion of its return from that investment at ordinary corporate rates.[fn6] So if CCRI borrowed money, the KUTV story is wrong, and CCRI is liable for federal income taxes.

But that’s not terribly interesting, so let’s pretend that CCRI didn’t borrow any money to do the development. The other major way that a 501(c)(3) could owe income taxes is if it earns “unrelated business taxable income.”

Basically, unrelated business taxable income is income earned by a tax-exempt organization from participating in a business unrelated to its exempt purpose. So, for example, if the Church were to start manufacturing and selling macaroni, it would be taxable on its profits from those macaroni sales in the same manner as a taxable macaroni manufacturer.

The line between businesses related and unrelated to a tax-exempt’s exempt purpose can be a difficult one, on the margins, to parse. So, for example, advertising revenue the NCAA receives from the programs it sells at the NCAA tournament is not taxable as unrelated business taxable income, even though the ads may be the same ones that would appear in Sports Illustrated. Ad income from a monthly medical journal run by a tax-exempt organization, on the other hand, is taxable as unrelated business taxable income.

Intuitively, rent from commercial real estate tenants doesn’t seem to come close to the line.  And actually, it doesn’t. Section 512(b)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code explicitly exempts from UBTI rents from real property. There is one exception to this exemption that may apply: if the rent is based on income or profits derived from the property, CCRI would be taxable on the rent.

Taubman says that it owns the property under a “participating lease” with CCRI. I don’t have any details on how that participating lease is structured but, if CCRI participates in Taubman’s income or profits, it will pay taxes on the rent it receives. On the other hand, if that participation is based on a fixed percentage of gross receipts or sales, CCRI will not be taxable on that income.

My ultimate conclusion: CCRI will probably not be taxable on the rent it receives from Taubman. If, however, CCRI borrowed money to invest in City Creek or if its participating lease is structured in a specific way, it will owe federal income tax on that rent.

—

[fn1] And, if they had, I wasn’t aware of them at the time.

[fn2] I don’t mean this to be a subtle or not-so-subtle dig at Utah. I just don’t have any roots there, and I have very little family there, so development of Salt Lake’s downtown isn’t terribly high on my list of things to pay attention to.

[fn3] I will say, when in doubt, I don’t like malls. That said, I have a hard time objecting to the glitziness of the stores at City Creek. Its tenants read like a pretty standard list of mid-range chain retailers. But that may be because I work a block away from Chicago’s Magnificent Mile (and across the street from a Bentley dealership) and, before, I worked about five blocks from Times Square (which is not, by the way, home to upscale retailers, either). But that’s entirely to the side of the point of this post.

[fn4] I could be wrong, of course—all of the information I have about this deal is what’s publicly available on teh Internets, so there are undoubtedly details I’m not aware of. Interestingly enough (to me, anyway), CCRI wasn’t formed to do this deal: it was founded and received its tax-exempt status in 1941. (Which leads me to the question: is City Creek a geographical location in Salt Lake? or is the development named after CCRI (which seems kind of weird to me)? or is this just serendipitous naming?)

[fn5] Donors to CCRI can also take a deduction for their donations, though I’m not sure whether CCRI takes donations.

[fn6] As an example, let’s say that CCRI borrows $1 million, and invests that $1 million with $1 million of its own income in Apple stock. Apple pays a $200,000 dividend. CCRI will have to pay taxes, at ordinary corporate rates, on $100,000 of the dividend, but the other $100,000 will be exempt from taxation.

The basic problem is this: “If there is anything in [an agent's] circumstances which precludes a person from exercising a power, then the power cannot be exercised under those circumstances” (249). Blake argues that God’s strong foreknowledge is just the kind of  causally implicated circumstance that compromises a person’s freedom to exercise their agency. As a result, the power to choose in this instance is no real power and agency is compromised. I recommend a close reading of the chapter’s details.

As a non-specialist, though, I’m wondering about the larger context that frames these really difficult questions.

Both with respect to the larger question of whether agency is compatible with determinism and with respect to the narrower question of whether agency is compatible with God’s foreknowledge, the difficulty seems to me to revolve around a kind of figure/ground problem.

The figure/ground problem is this: how do the actions of a local figure fit with the generic background of conditions and circumstances that constitute its field of action? Or, more pointedly, how can the local exercise of a heterogeneous agency be compatible with a pre-existing field of homogeneous and comprehensive conditions?

With respect to the narrower issue of God’s foreknowledge, the question is: how can the heterogeneity of a local agency be compatible with a pre-existing field of conditions and circumstances already packaged, totalized, and homogenized by God’s absolute and limitless foreknowledge?

With respect to the wider issue of determinism, the question is: how can the heterogeneity of a local agency be compatible with a field of conditions and circumstances already pre-formatted as a single, homogeneous background of cause and effect?

In short, how can a local agent be invested with power to act freely and heterogeneously in relation to a homogeneous, pre-formatted field?

This is a really difficult question. It shows up again and again in philosophy in a thousand different forms.

I want to suggest, in what may be a naive way, that part of the problem here may be with the form of the question itself.

Blake, for instance, argues against God’s absolute foreknowledge on the grounds that, given the background of such a homogeneous, pre-formatted field, agency is compromised. The centrality of agency ought to trump our commitment to the existence of that kind of pre-formatted and totalized field of foreknowledge. So absolute foreknowledge is out. (I think this is right.)

But why not make the same argument in relation to the wider ontological question? Why not argue that agency ought to trump our assumption that actions unfold in the context of a field of conditions and circumstances already pre-formatted by a single, homogeneous background of cause and effect?

In short, why think about agency as something that unfolds in a single, smooth, field period?

What if there is no single, shared, pre-formatted, metaphysical background against which agency plays out? If the reality of agency is incompatible with the idea of such a field, then what if we ditched the field?

What’s the alternative?

There’s no space to give a very convincing answer here, but the alternative is roughly something like this.

Rather than agency playing out in relation to a single, shared, and pre-formatted field, agency plays out only in relation to other agents. There is no absolute figure/ground relation. There is no ultimate frame of reference. There are no agents interacting in a single field. There are just agents embedded in and acting in relation to other agents. Reality is agents all the way down (and all the way up). There is no meta-container, no set of all sets. There are only agents. To be sure, there are localized “fields” of action but these “fields” are themselves nothing but partially overlapping (and only partially commensurable) agents. Every “field” is local and every “field” is itself an agent (and/or composed of agents). There is no “global.”

The traditional notion is that the universe starts out whole and complete. The traditional problem is then how agency is possible. Note, especially, that, to the degree that agency does show up in this kind of world, it shows up only as sin – as something that breaks and kills the integrity of world such that the world needs to be saved.

Mormons don’t have to start with this assumption of an original unity or meta-contextual totality. What if we tried out the alternate scenario? Let’s begin instead with the assumption of a multitude of only partially compatible agencies that are not embedded in a single, prefabricated whole. Let’s assume that unity is not pre-given and then lost, but only painstakingly (and only ever partially) made by way of agency. Let’s assume that it may well be our job to try to put the universe together, but let’s not assume that it is our job to put it back together.

In this scenario, we may be able to not only make room for the existence of agency, but for its goodness as well.

And, frankly, I don’t have any reason to think that it will in the 21st century; the Law of Consecration seems to be something different than economic communalism (though economic communalism fits within the Law of Consecration).

But I’ve been thinking recently about the consequences of introducing a United Order into modern American culture. And frankly, the tax consequences strike me as pretty interesting.[fn2]

For purposes of a hypothetical look at the tax consequences of a new United Order, of course, we have to define the United Order; there have actually been at least three iterations of United Orders, each with their own characteristics. Lucas and Woodward assert that the specific forms of these United Orders reflected the different economic situations in which they were formed; the Kirtland version reflected an agrarian economy, where the various Utah versions reflected an Industrial Revolution economy.[fn3]

What does that mean for my purposes? Basically, it means that, were the United Order to be established in our current information economy,[fn4] it would probably differ significantly from any historical United Order. I don’t have any idea what the modern version would look like so, instead, I’m going to look at the consequences of transporting the Kirtland United Order to 2012. Why Kirtland? Because (a) its basic contours are detailed in the D&C, (b) it’s the version I’m most familiar with off the top of my head, and (c) I’ve actually thought about the tax consequences attendant to it.

For these purposes, I’m assuming that the transplanted United Order looks something like this: (1) members contribute all of their property to the Church; (2) the Church provides members with property to meet their needs, (3) using this property, members work at their professions during the year, and (4) to the extent they have surplus at the end of the year, they contribute such surplus back to the Church. And repeat.

So what would the tax consequences be?

(1) Donation of property. Because I’m assuming the donation would be made to the Church, a 501(c)(3) organization, the member could deduct the fair market value of her donation from her income for the year. Except that the deduction would be limited; under current tax law, your charitable deduction for a year cannot exceed 50 percent of her adjusted gross income for the year.

That is, assume that you make just over $100,000, so that you have adjusted gross income of $100,000. Also assume that you have a house worth $200,000, a car worth $10,000, and other property worth $15,000. You donate this property, worth $225,000, to the Church in order to join the United Order. But you don’t get a $225,000 deduction; instead, you get a deduction for $50,000, and will owe taxes on your remaining $50,000 of income for the year.

(2) Income from your job. It’s taxable to the member. Even if we posited a more extreme version of the United Order, where all of a member’s earnings were paid directly to the Church by the employer, income earned by an individual is still taxable to that individual. The quintessential example of this rule is in the case of Fogarty v. U.S. Father Fogarty, a Jesuit priest, had taken the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. His religious superior told him to teach a religious studies class at UVA, which he did. His paycheck from the University was deposited into his Order’s bank account. The court held that, in spite of the fact that he gave it all to his order, that he was sincere in his beliefs, and that he took the teaching gig at the behest of his Order, the income was taxable to him.

(3) Assets received from the Church. The “stewardship” received from the Church would almost definitely constitute income to the member.[fn5] Taxing a member on her stewardship make sense, too: to the extent the member got a deduction (albeit potentially limited) when she donated assets to the Church, she should have a corresponding income inclusion when she receives assets from the Church. Otherwise, you create a really easy tax shelter: a person with $100,000 of income could donate $50,000 to a church or other 501(c)(3) organization, and then receive, say, $45,000[fn6] in non-taxable income back, and she would have cut her taxable income in half.

A couple final thoughts: first, I realize this is U.S.-centric. And it is necessarily the case—I don’t have sufficient knowledge of other countries’ tax systems to post anything substantive on them.

Also, this will never happen. Back in 1830s Ohio, there was no federal income tax; ours only dates back to 1913. Plus we have an entirely different economic model; any United Order would presumably take those (and other) considerations into account.

Still, it’s fun to think about.

—

[fn1] At least, I’m not aware of any such attempt. If I’m wrong about this assumption, I’d love to hear details.

[fn2] Of course, tax consequences often strike me as pretty interesting . . .

[fn3] See James W. Lucas & Warner P. Woodworth, Working Toward Zion 111 (1999) (“As early as the 1870s, Brigham Young and other Church leaders knew that establishing an industrialized united order in the desert could not be carried out by individual efforts as in Missouri and Ohio.”).

[fn4] Or however you want to classify our current economy.

[fn5] Similarly, I suspect that Church welfare assistance constitutes gross income to the recipients. I could be wrong; if it’s considered a gift, it isn’t taxable to the recipient. And Church welfare assistance may qualify as a gift (though off the top of my head, I kind of doubt it), but I’m pretty sure that a United Order stewardship wouldn’t.

[fn6] Why only $45,000 back? Because if it worked, this would be a tax shelter; when you buy a tax shelter, you have to pay the counterparty for its participation. In 2012, with income of $100,000, you’re paying taxes at a marginal rate of 25 percent (if you’re married filing jointly) or 28 percent (if you’re single. Your tax savings from converting $50,000 of taxable income to untaxable income would be $12,500 or $14,000 respectively; surely you could spare $5,000 to make the transaction happen.

But why? Why would Romney give the Church equity stakes in bad fast-food chains, second-rate pizza chains, and other such holdings?[fn1]

Taxes. Sure, there may be other reasons, too, but there’s a significant tax advantage to donating appreciated assets to charities.[fn2]

Remember, certain donors to 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches, can take a deduction for donations they make to that organization. An example of how it works: assume that in 2011 I itemized my deductions, that I earned $100,000[fn3], that my marginal tax rate was 25%, and that I wrote a check to the Church for $10,000. As a result of my charitable contribution, I can deduct the $10,000, which lowers my tax bill by $2,500.

And, it turns out, I get the same deduction if, instead of writing a check for $10,000, I donate, for example, stock worth $10,000. I get a deduction for the fair market value of property donated.

But that stock donation may save me more than $2,500 in taxes. Because we don’t know right now what I paid for the stock. Assume, for example, that I paid $1,000 for the stock I donate. If I wanted to get access to its $10,000 of value, I would have to sell the stock. I would realize a gain of $9,000, which would currently be taxed at a 15% rate, so I would owe $1,350 of taxes. In fact, if I sold the stock for $10,000 cash, and took those bills and gave them to my bishop, I would still owe $1,350 in taxes on my gain.

But the gain is not triggered when I donate the stock to the Church. So now I have a $10,000 deduction that saves me $2,500 in taxes, and I have a potential tax liability of $1,350 that will never materialize. And, because money is fungible, by fulfilling my tithing liability with property, I’ve freed up $10,000 of liquid assets to do with as I please.

And what does the Church do with Burger King stock? It has two options: it can put the stock in its investment portfolio, or it can sell the stock and use the $10,000 it realizes (and doesn’t pay taxes on—remember, the Church, like all 501(c)(3)s, doesn’t pay taxes on its investment income) to do whatever it would have done with the $10,000 in cash that I could have donated. I suspect, in general, that the Church (and, frankly, most charities) takes the second route.

—

[fn1] It may be that Romney didn’t donate all of those stocks, but his campaign acknowledges that he donated at least some.

[fn2] Note that, from this point on, any motive I suggest for Romney or the Church is pure conjecture: I don’t know Mitt Romney personally. It is within the realm of possibility that he had substantive non-tax reasons for giving the Church a share of Burger King. That said, I kind of doubt it.

[fn3] I should note that the amount of money I earn is something other than $100,000. But, for the sake of mathematical simplicity, every hypothetical person I deal with earns $100,000.

Am I Siamese?  How many conjoin me? How many compose me? How many do I host? How many have I colonized? How wide does my cheesecloth interviduality spread?

It’s pretty clear, I think, that my “individual” self is largely a story I’m selling myself. Jesus wants me to lose this self and get on with life, but it’s hard. I find that I love this story more than life. At least, I choose the one over the other again and again.

My “self” is a shadow that my multitude casts. The shadow is simple, clean, flat, and black. That simplicity is a fiction. Given where my multitude stands, the cant of the sun, the shape I’m bodying, my shadow may give an accurate adumbration – but the adumbration hides more than it shows.

There’s nothing wrong with shadows. Shadows are real shadows. The trouble starts when, instead of just casting a shadow, I try to identify with it. (O’ that I were my shadow!) The trouble starts when I try to bottle its simplicity, its clean-cut individuality, as the truth about what I really am. Sin is this compulsive attempt to forget the unruly multitudes that compose me and to finally, successfully sync with my shadow. Hell is succeeding.

The main characters in Steven Peck‘s novel, The Scholar of Moab, all display this kind of messy irreducibility. (Read BHodges excellent BCC review here). Here’s the book’s official synopsis:

What happens when a two-headed cowboy, a high school dropout who longs to be a scholar, and a poet who claims to have been abducted by aliens come together in 1970’s Moab, Utah? The Scholar of Moab, a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the La Sal Mountains.

Young Hyrum Thane, unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon assassins, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again.

Making matters worse, Hyrum’s illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, ends in the delivery of a premature baby boy who vanishes the night of its birth. Righteous Moabites accuse Dora of its murder, but who really killed their child? Did a coyote dingo the baby? Was it an alien abduction as Dora claims? Was it Hyrum? Or could it have been the only witness to the crime, one of a pair of Oxford-educated conjoined twins who cowboy in the La Sals on sabbatical?

How many is a two-headed cowboy? Riding under the open sun, the cowboy and his horse cast just one (three-headed) shadow.

At one point, early in the novel, the Oxford-educated conjoined twins are in Paris attending a lecture given by the brilliant French obscurantist Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze, working to explain what he calls the Virtual, spots the twins and seizes the illustration:

Suddenly, Delueze pointed at us with his long-nailed finger and said, “There! There is repetition caught in the moment between virtuality and actuality, between possibility and the unification of multiplicity, between the qualitative and the quantitative. There! There is ‘différance’ screaming towards existence, existence sluicing through potentiality, and potential itself skating unforgivingly toward emergent unity.” Thom called us a topological manifold of singularity, a “projection” resisting reduction in complementary planes of asymmetry. (32-33)

Conjoined twins are an easy target if you’re talking about “a topological manifold of singularity” or a “projection resisting reduction in complementary planes of asymmetry,” but Peck’s novel presses the point that the twins are not unique in this respect. Rather, they dramatize for us a general truth about the human condition. To be a human being is to exist simultaneously on complementary but asymmetrical planes. Who doesn’t feel like a repetition caught between virtuality and actuality?

The human way of being is split, composite, spread, distributed, and open-ended. The human way of being is to be of two minds, to depend on bodies we can influence but not control, to think thoughts we don’t understand, to repeat words that are not our own, and to pursue goals we’re not sure we want.

For the conjoined twins, things are even more complex than Deleuze imagined. Doctors discover that the twins have a “third mind” – affectionately referred to by the twins as Marcel – a “neural mass” that is at once a hub, a relay, and something independent of either of its heads. An abstract of the doctor’s report indicates that

at times, the neural mass acts according to the desires of neither twin – e.g., to run from ambiguous danger (one, say, that neither twin has noticed) or to seek out sexual activity. Some activities require coordination of both the neural mass and the twins. For example, bathroom functions require the integration of all three personalities with the neural mass alone detecting, for instance, the need of urination. . . . However, the mass can make decisions independent of either. What this implies about the nature of consciousness is discussed, including whether this neural mass is an independent and separate consciousness. Thoughts on what this means for personhood are explored. (58-59)

What have you named your neural mass? Your third mind? Your fourth one? What New Year’s resolutions have you made to better integrate the assemblage that you are? What rogue parts of you probably need more compassion rather than more discipline?

Hyrum Thane, the novel’s main character, suffers a more subtle version of interviduality than the conjoined twins. Fresh from the trailer park, he works as a hired-hand for geology PhDs surveying desert strata and he feels pretty keenly his “ignorance” in relation to them. One day, the butt of a joke, one of them says to Hyrum: “Man! What a Dickensian life you lead” (19). Hyrum, however, doesn’t know what this means and, as a result, it drives him crazy. This comment, Hyrum says, “got under my skin & started Itching so bad it wouldn’t go away until I got it Scratched” (25).

Here, rather than having two heads, Hyrum gets something stuck in his head, a unknown word, a foreign phrase, that lodges itself there, takes root, colonizes his mind, and hacks his attention. It shapes him and compels him. He can’t stop repeating it back to himself and ends up with a big pile of rocks. That first day, he says,

I started counting & every time I thought it I threw a rock at a tree. When it was time to head down I just walked over to the tree & counted up the rocks. That is exactly how many times I thought it between the time I ate my lunch & the time we packed up to go back to the base camp. I wanted to let you get a feel for my afternoon ruminations. (19)

To give you a feel for the force of it’s self-replication, Peck then fills five pages with “Man! What a Dickensian life you lead. Man! What a Dickensian life you lead. Man! What a Dickensian life you lead,” to the exact number of rocks (118!) Hyrum counted himself as having thrown that first afternoon.

I am Hyrum, except that rather than a foreign phrase colonizing my mind, I’ve got a whole book. The Book of Mormon, lodged like an eccentric body between my ears, spools in an endless loop. Like Hyrum, I didn’t ask for it,  suspect it may be an insult, and don’t know what it means.

Still, it composes me, conjoins me, compels me, and overwrites me as literally as any third-wheel neural mass could. The Book of Mormon is a life-sized brain hack spanning my years, itching under my skin, interrupting my story, deforming my shadow. The Book of Mormon exists in a complementary but asymmetrical plane. It’s an irrational number, a tangent reorienting my bundle of divergent lines.

What the Book of Mormon is meant to do or mean, I am not sure. But to what it does do, I can attest: it keeps me up at night, it wakes me early in the morning, it keeps me from folding in on myself, from coinciding with the shadow I work to project, from imploding into a vacuum-packed hell where my “self” and my life become one and the same.

This is a little bit crazy, but it saves me from being completely sane.

Over the summer, the Bloomberg administration announced that, for the first time in two decades, public school students in New York would be required to take sex-ed. The curriculum the administration recommended—HealthSmart (middle school and high school) and Reducing the Risk—include, among other things, lessons on abstinence and birth control.

Not surprisingly, the proposal has been controversial. It seems like sex-ed is one of the culture-wars topics that never gets old. But I’m not really a culture-wars person, and the real or purported controversy of New York’s most recent foray into sex education wouldn’t have really interested me except for one thing: the Bloomberg administration’s purpose for making this move. Specifically, the move was part of its strategy to “improve the lives of black and Latino teenagers.”

Sex-ed isn’t usually justified, in my experience, as a tool to achieve social justice, or an anti-poverty measure. New York, though, tied its sex-ed to improving kids’ economic potential.

How? In Creating an Opportunity Society (which I’ve mentioned before), Haskins and Sawhill say that families headed by a person who (1) graduated from high school, (2) works full-time, and (3) doesn’t have children out of wedlock has a 98% chance of escaping poverty.[fn1]

And comprehensive sex education seems to be fairly effective at achieving (3). And not just because it teaches kids how to have consequence-free[fn2] sex. Recent research suggests that teenagers who receive comprehensive sex education are 60% less likely to become pregnant or impregnate somebody than teenagers who receive no sex education.[fn3] Moreover, comprehensive sex education slightly reduced the the likelihood of teenagers having sex in the first place.[fn4]

So what does this mean to us as Mormons? The Handbook of Instructions says that parents are responsible for their kids’ sex education. But it doesn’t end there: it says that, if sex-ed is offered in the schools, parents should ensure that the instruction is consistent with “sound moral and ethical values.”

So we’ve got a moral responsibility to engage with schools’ sex education. And, I’d argue, our sound moral and ethical values at least force us to consider supporting comprehensive sex-ed. Note that I don’t mean this as a blanket endorsement of anything that flies under the rubric of comprehensive sex-ed.[fn5] But the numbers indicate that including information on contraception in a well-designed curriculum substantially reduces teen pregnancy, marginally reduces teen sex, and doesn’t cause kids who wouldn’t have had sex to suddenly have it. Even if we’re convinced our kids won’t have premarital sex (and I think that assuming that all kids will have premarital sex is condescending; some certainly will, but my personal experience suggests that it’s far from inevitable), supporting good instruction can potentially improve the economic and spiritual and emotional lives of the teenagers around them.

—

* I know that the phrase “social justice” riles some people up; I assume sex-ed gets a different group. If I included tax here, I’d have the perfect storm.

[fn1] Haskins & Sawhill p. 70.

[fn2] I don’t, of course, mean “consequence-free”; among other things, there are emotional and spiritual consequences to sex. But using contraception can significantly decrease the risk of pregnancy and, in some cases, STDs.

[fn3] Teens who received abstinence-only sex-ed were 30% less likely to become pregnant or impregnate somebody, but, apparently, this number was statistically insignificant.

[fn4] I should note that this makes some intuitive sense to me: I can’t imagine anything making sex seem less sexy to a teenager than a required high school class. I also can’t fathom how teaching about how to use contraception could possibly be useful to anybody: using a condom, for example, isn’t rocket science. But, on the other hand, I was once helping a home teachee move and, in the course of packing, we saw a couple wood phalluses on her shelf. Sheepishly, she explained that, in the course of her job as a social worker in prisons, she taught prisoners how to use a condom. So maybe condom use is not as intuitive as it seems.

[fn5] Although, frankly, from looking at the websites, the curricular subjects aren’t nearly as offensive as the HealthSmart website; seriously, what is it about public schools and horrible web design?