Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited
© 1958 Aldhous Huxley
144 pages

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931)  transported readers to a deeply creepy nightmare-vision of the future, in which man had disappeared as an independent being, instead becoming the raw materials for a new, engineered hive creature.  In Brave New World Revisited,  Huxley shares his fear that the technocratic domination of society is proceeding much more quickly than he had anticipated, and then outlines reasons for concern and the vectors by which free minds could be compromised and manipulated.

The crux of the problem, says Huxley, is overpopulation. Viewing a global population of 3 billion in horror, Huxley anticipated not only only mass starvation, but the rise of tyranny across the world.   Rising population would crowd more of humanity in cities, where disease both physical and mental would become an ever-greater threat.  The rising misery, he believed, would have the effect of  fraying civil society so much that Communist orders promosing food for all would be imposed.  Though not a libertarian, Huxley takes Lord Acton's appraisal of power and human nature to heart. Even an innocent desire for order, he argues, can carry the controlling authority away, resulting in creeping and then  quickly-hardening tyranny. Eugenics is an obvious example, and the subject of his second chapter.

The bulk of the book, after the opening essays on population crises and eugenics, examines ways in which technology might begin to subjugate human psychology.  His original novel was published in 1931, two years before Adolf Hitler took power and achieved the closest thing the world had seen to total technological command of a people;  Hitler not only grasped how mob mentalities could be manipulated, he used the latest in communications technology to constantly convey his message.  Huxley examines the tools of Hitler's trade, as well as others introduced in the decade after World War 2 that might be the stuff of future empires. These include chemical agents, sleep conditioning, emotional propaganda, and different forms of torture.  In each section, Huxley mentions precursors of them already in-use, like pervasive advertising and the  attempted creation of consequence-free feel-good drugs. 

I knew nothing about Huxley before starting this, but he proves to have  been a thoughtful and well-read man  Some of his concerns about overpulation obviously seem dated, given that the global population is presently 7.6 billion, with consistent declines in starvation rates.Overpopulation means increased demand for everything, not just food, so  it's still an issue to be concerned about -- whether your  concern is resource wars or global warming. The pressure these populations put on governments to "do something" -- about a great many things -- has resulted in declining self-determination across the board, with all levels of government.  Huxley's view of the city as a profoundly unnatural environment, one that induces mental diseases, is still argued -- see Desmond Morris' The Human Zoo. 

Modern readers of this will find, then, some of it dated but a great deal still relevant, as far as human psychology goes;   whatever one makes of shifts in our mores, human nature has not changed since 1958.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination Of Your Child

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination Of Your Child
© 2010 Anthony Esolen
256 pages

In the spirit of The Screwtape Letters comes this, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination Of Your Child.  Anthony Esolen opens by observing that the western world obviously does not like its children, or it would treat them differently.  In mocking appreciation for what passes for modern education and parenting, Esolen offers a guide to what is being done well, and offers advice for even more efficiently crushing their messy little humans into conveniently-formed bricks in the wall.  Dripping with irony, this manual for childhood destruction is really a defense of being human,  calling parents’ attention to how much has been lost and reminding them what is valuable and good about being ye as children.

In his introduction, Esolen notes that American children spend the majority of their day in warehouses, surrounded by people who do not love them.  We have reduced our children to commodities -- to be bussed, warehoused, and then put to use in the economy.  In the process, some of the essence of humanity -- curiosity, adoration, innocent dreams -- are snuffed out. (Think of the native passion for learning about the world, for instance, which is absent in most adults.)  Esolen criticizes the very nature of schoolrooms themselves, the strict age segregation and the concentration of hundreds of kids into the same spaces.  The socialization received in such institutions is the same received in prisons: the socialization of gangs and cattle.  These mass schools are Efficient, but human beings are not creatures who can be made efficiently.  We are handicrafts,  best shaped by learned hands with the experience of years in them -- who know how to work out our lumps and produce something that is beautiful without having to be perfect.

The dreary mentality of the factory, the curse of Taylorism -- "scientific management", in which factory laborers were turned into efficient cogs by doing the same practiced motion over and over again --  has penetrated deep into the school.  The risky, the inefficient, are kept away. Gone are childhood adventures outside; the kids sit inside, transfixed by their phones.   Gone, too, are the self-organized games played on the street and in any vacant lot, the games that allowed children their first taste of adulthood -- for there they regulated their games, improvising as they needed to to allow for limited conditions or layers.   If children 'play' sports now, they only do it in organized teams,  supervised constantly by adults. The little saplings are never free to bask in the sun, not with looming pines above them.  What should be done for sheer joy  is instead pursued for filling out a college resume; the commodity's only value is for its utility.

Esolen's criticism goes beyond education, though he fires sallies it at regularly given how much  time kids spend institutionalized.  The parent who wishes to spiritually neuter their child, to turn play into passivity, would do well to plunk them down in front of television.  Not only will it shorten their attention span and keep them fixated for hours on end, but it will take the time they could have been using to get into trouble --  exploring outside, for instance.  This trivialization of the human experience continues in the reflexive sneering-at of men and women once lauded as extraordinary, as well as the reduction of sexuality to meat and friction -- instead of the dangerous, beautiful act of creation it once was. The triumph of triteness has reduced “love”  to lust, or admiration, or preference, or any old thing – but never devotion and affection.

Esolen is ultimately arguing for a childhood and a human life that is valuable for being human, not for economic utility. His version of childhood is one that is rooted in the family, not in organization; he dreams of children sitting at their parents' feet, admiring them and heroes from fiction and history, wanting to grow up to be good men and women themselves.  Esolen renders his rebukes not in a despairing tone, but in a mischievous, playful one; the same one that appears in his lectures on Dante ,where he off-handedly mentions that the motto of a given university is in fact taken from Dante.(There is always a lone guffaw when he intones: "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate...")*  Esolen's wit is also audacious, as seen when he started mocking television...while on television. The hosts cut him off rather awkwardly. It is an argument for a humanistic education -- that is, one that takes as its purpose the fulfillment of the human person, not  producing Dewey's faithful subjects for the state.

* Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Related:
The Unschooling Handbook, Mary Griffith
School Sucks Podcast
Free Range Kids

Affluenza

Affluenza: the All-Consuming Epidemic
© 2001, 2004, 2014  John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas Naylor
288 pages

In getting and spending, we lay waste to all our powers -- so sayeth the poet. Originally published in 2001, Affluenza is a critique of consumerism, which it depicts as a disease affecting not just the body politic, but the environment. The authors use visual language drawn from medicine -- "feverish expectation", "hardening of the traffic arteries", "community chills" to argue that rampant consumerism is not only making us unhappy,  it has unraveled communities and is presently sacking the Earth.  This book has been on my radar for many years now, but I've always resisted it given that I'm in the choir this is preaching to.  I found it more varied than expected, and it does an admirable job of attempting to be nonpartisan. This third edition is genuinely valuable in keeping the material up to date,  using the sharing economy as a way of demonstrating of how we can do more with less,  Most of the suggestions for cutting back are appropriate only for an affluent audience, however, so I suspect the target audience is the comfortable-yet-feeling-guilty.

Affluenza has a pronounced emphasis on environmentalism, but it opens with a more diverse array of topics.  There's a disappointingly small section on the psychology of desire, how we pursue happiness through the acquisition or consumption of things but are then left feeling unsatisfied.  Their history of consumerism draws from works like Susan Strasser's Satisfaction Guaranteed indicate that the family-based consumer dream of the 1950s quickly became an individual-based consumer dream, with society being re-made to match.   Stores, for instance, became locations to go to and consume, rather than being part of the community; compare walking down the street and mingling with fellow citizens, then buying goods in a small bookstore owned  by someone in the community, whose business interacted and supported other businesses (local accountants and sign-makers, for instance), to a solitary individual driving by himself to a large box owned and sustained by a corporation outside the community.   The  mass focus on maximizing individual consumption -- the cheapest price, at any cost -- has reactions that not only unravel the very fabric of communities, but create lonelier people in the bargain.  Technology is something of an enabler in this regard: people whip out cell phones to stay "connected" the moment there is a lull in their activity, but in so doing lose focus of the very people they are with.  I think Erich Fromm -- who wrote in To Have or to Be? that we have become a people obsessed with having, with possessing and attempting to mount our happiness on that -- would have much to say about people who attend a play or go to the zoo and spend the entire time staring at their phones.....so concerned with capturing the experience they actually remove themselves from the experience.

The chapters on the despair of consumer therapy have the authors at their nonpartisan best. They report with delight that the Mormons are even more concerned about consumerism -- or rather, materialism -- than the students of Berkley.  They quote William Ropke's A Humane Economy: the Social Framework of the Free Market, in which the conservative offers a measured defense of free markets -- measured in that the free market is a necessary element of a free society, but  that it cannot be  the definer of its values.  Elsewhere,  they continually use the conservative label to refer to  anyone in league with advertisers and plutocrats, so I don't think they're very used to seeing anti-consumerism as a nonpartisan issue.  They marvel at Ropke,  asking readers if they could imagine any conservative writing such a thing today. Well...yes?  Rob Dreher, Wendell Berry,  and Anthony Esolen are a few who come to mind immediately, and just about anyone writing for The American Conservative.    Another hiccough is that the authors don't seem to be paying attention to what they write:  shortly after proposing a series of laws with the object of improving quality of life by reducing hours and mandating vacation/sick/universal paternity-maternity care,  they discuss a factory that reduced its operations to four days a week to save money, despite the union's protests.  After fighting to resume the five-hour day, the union's members immediately realized they actually preferred the extra day off, and so petitioned to reverse their previous petition. The authors comment that it was unfortunate that the  initial choice was forced on people,  apparently not realizing that its previous list of mandatory this--and-thats are also forced.  Ditto for the authors hailing regulatory agencies and in the same breath lamenting that said regulatory agencies are in cahoots with the people they're supposed to be policing.   Regulatory capture, dear authors --  problems can't be dispatched with a bill from Congress.

I found Affluenza an interesting book, quoting from a good range of authors --  diverse in fields as well as core beliefs. Its overall emphasis is a little weak, I think -- "Someday we're going to run out of resources and that will suck". Environmental stewardship is always an easier sell from the  immediate quality of life angle (clean air and water) than the more abstract (bad things...eventually..in the future).   The same is true for anti-consumerism and advocacy for simple living; they would be better served with an emphasis on the misery of getting-and-spending than on matters that can only be handled by the national government at large, i.e public policy.


Related books which were cited:
Satisfaction Guaranteed, Susan Strasser
Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam
The Geography of Nowhere, Jim Kunstler
American Mania: Why More is Never Enough, Peter Whybrow

Cited and on my to-read list:
Alone Together, Sherry Turkel
A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market

Related:
The Plain Reader, various authors

Out of the Ashes

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture
© 2017 Anthony Esolen
256 pages

Some things, like a Roman bridge, can last for millennia through the virtue of their design, the simplicity of their use, and the inherent strength of their materials. Other things, like the Golden Gate Bridge,  or a house, require more steady attention. It isn't that they're built in an inferior fashion, but they are far more complicated and ambitious.  A culture is a thing that requires attention; it must be renewed generation to generation. In Out of the Ashes,  Anthony Esolen calls attention of Americans to the fact that western culture  is past need for attention: it has sat too long exposed to the elements without refreshing layers of paint, the termites and mice of base creation have withered away its walls and support posts, and the foundation has sunk and cracked. What is needed is rebuilding and restoration. No one can do everything, but everyone must do something, and here Esolen offers hearty arguments for resurrecting education, play, a society based on marriage, family, and the home, politics reoriented towards the local, and the veneration of beauty and virtue. In short, he bids us deny the unholy trinity of Self, Sex, and the State, and  to become participants in our own lives once more.

In interviews and lectures Esolen maintains that what  we must realize about American culture is that there isn't a culture there at all, merely memories and leftover habits. It is as we are walking through a dry creekbed; the impression of the creek is still there upon the land, even as the water itself is a far-distant trickle.  The role of culture in Esolen's sense isn't the mere transmission of music and games from generation to generation, with improvisation and growth along the way. Instead, culture is more broadly applied to civil institutions supporting a common appreciation of man and the cosmos, supporting human life -- the cultivation of man as it were, the garden in which we are watered, thrive, and  create anew the next generation.  Society formerly relied on the  subtle, consistent, and constant pressure of civil society -- of places like the home, the church, and the school. These were all institutions which people not only participated in, they were in complete control of them.   These institutions not only shared a common architectural language, in that schoolhouses, homes, and village churches might look like, but they shared a common mission in promoting human welfare.  That mission was also shared by social organization (the organization of dances to allow young people to meet one another, for instance) and ordinary habit, like allowing children to run outside and play unattended.   In 2001, Robert Putnam decried the decline of civil institutions -- churches, civic groups, bowling clubs, local political moments -- and attempted to figure out what caused their decline. Now the fall is complete:  state schools are such failures that colleges must teach remedial English (prior to their English Literature courses on Twilight and Fifty Shades, Dickens and Stoker having been dumped);   young adults raised in the hookup miasma have no socialization in creating a bonafide  soul-speaks-to-soul relationship,  and every romantic encounter must be  carefully navigated lest someone be sued because the old culture what ensured everyone knew what was appropriate and what was not is lost.

There is no use complaining; we can only rebuild, and the place to start is the family.  Esolen emphatically rejects the modern primacy of the individual, maintaining the family is the foundation of every human society. The home and family are where children are created, nurtured, and taught to become authentic members of their society, their polis.   Speaking of the polis, it too needs awakening:   the State has taken away every prerogative of local communities, leaving them a few pittances like garbage pickup. This is wrong in that it takes away from people the ability to be effective citizens of their community.  Citizenship in the national government means nothing; the individual is grist in the mill.  Yet there is little point in running for something like the school board nowadays, because the decisions have already been decided by far-distant strangers who know better than people what and how to teach their children.   Esolen thus encourages people to create alternative institutions, to  homeschool their children and work together to create private colleges in response to the past-pathetic state of university education today, a place that provides safe spaces and coloring books to its wards instead of teaching them to grapple, body and soul, with adversity and ignorance.   Yet helping to participate in the restoration of society isn't as formidable as creating new and virile sources of education like St. John's and Christendom College;   it can be as simple as learning to appreciate the poetic beauty of traditional hymns,  so much more potent than the happy-clappy praisesongs favored by megachurches -- or leaving the television behind to use one's leisure time to build something with their hands.   Fight ugliness with beauty, lies with truth, decay with work. Participation is the thing -- walking one's neighborhood and picking up litter is more effective than parading about D.C. dressed up as a vagina.

Esolen's concerns are not necessarily exclusive to Christians;  the Swedish eudaimonic philosopher Alain de Botton, for instance,  has written extensively on the role of art, literature, and architecture in human flourishing,  seeing them as important as philosophy in allowing human beings to grow to fulness.  Wendell Berry and Bill Kauffman are both emphatic voices for subsidiarity,  but rarely refer to religion.  Robert Putnam also delivered the essential book on civil culture's decline in his Bowling Alone, which was not religious in the least.  Nevertheless, Esolen is indisputably writing primarily to Christians,  because the west’s civil culture has been Christian, and he is  inspired and rooted by the Catholic social doctrine, referring to papal encyclical at times. At the end Esolen doubles down that he is writing a defense of Christian civilization.   As he urges readers to devote themselves once more to truth and beauty amid the constant babble-babble of lies coming from politicians, the news, and , the amazon of banality that is social media, he bids them to realize that truth remains treason in the empire of lies, and that  ultimately, we pursue the good and true because it is Good, not to create a heaven on Earth. That can never be, for all Christians are ultimately pilgrims on a journey to another world.

Esolen -- whom I've heard described as a "fun Jeremiah" --  is a joy to listen to and to read, a man of passion with a deep bench of literary references. In a lecture on the decline of culture, for instance,  he once used an obscure play by Ben Johnson to make his point. In an interview, someone off-handedly mentions a hymn -- "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" -- and Esolen recognizes it, seizes on it with joy, and at once begins lovingly reciting it.  He is capable of slinging barbs as his foes, but animosity is largely absent here. Instead he writes here in a mood of intense concern, driven on by hope in redemption.   For those who  look at the American landscape -- all the lonely people, the dehumanizing stretches of asphalt and smoke, the constant presence of the foul beast of Jabba the State, who forever demands attention and obedience -- this is a handbook to what went wrong, and a bracing cup to cheer to begin the work of restoring a more humane culture.

Related:
Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam

Seeing like a State

Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed
© 1999 James Scott
464 pages

            Seeing like a State scrutinizes the organizational approach of state governments and other large institutions from the Renaissance era onward. In essence ,James C. Scott demonstrates how reductionist top down attempts at understanding and planning tend to be.  In attempting to render comprehensible complex systems – whether those systems are forests, cities, or national economies – vital information is lost.  Scott argues that the greatest value of aggressive organization is to increase the power and control of the organizer; this is in fact the point of organization in most cases, as with mandating last names. In  other cases, like the creation of forest management, power is achieved more indirectly through the state consolidating and advancing its economic agenda.  In reducing forest farming to one species, however, and planning it rigidly, the rich variety that makes a successful forest thrive is lost. The farm becomes susceptible to vigorous disease; monoculture produces the same results everywhere. The order imposed is accomplished at the cost of life; cities disintegrate when their rich diversity is broken up, rigidly segregated with zoning laws, and lumped together in sprawling clumps. Reviewing dying forests, moribund cities, and nations with collapsed collectivist economies,  Scott argues for decentralized approaches that allow practical, experiential knowledge -- metis -- to predominant, instead of abstract, general knowledge, or techne.  The difference between them can be found in ecologically savvy farming of the kind practiced by Joel Salatin, who instead of imposing a system of agriculture on farms he is invited to steward, fleshes one out on an individual site basis, figuring out which natural cycles can be recreated. This decentralized approach works well with cities and farms, which are complex enough to defy successful planning from on high;  it is hard to imagine a revival of manufacturing lead by artisans instead of industrialists, however.  Scott's case leaves no doubt that organization leads to greater power for the organizers,  but is it avoidable?

The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer

The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer
© 2010 Joel Salatin
300 pages

Joel Salatin is crazy and glad to be so;  in print and in media like Food, Inc and Fresh, he gleefully rejects what the late 20^th century produced as conventional farming.  The Sheer Ectasy of being a Lunatic Farmer is a defense of farming, and in particular a defense of his  kind of farming. While grounded in traditional knowledge, Salatin’s delivery incorporates a lot of modern ecological connections.  His style is folksy in the extreme, the narrative a conversation. Salatin is no rube, though,   His and his father's approach redeemed a swath of dead land, turning it into a thriving business -- and Salatin himself has become a leader in the local foods movement.

Sheer Ectcstasy opens with a history of how Salatin's father gave new life to their purchased farm. They made the foundation of their farm not a good range of machinery, but the health of the soil. Take care of the soil, and everything else will follow. Salatin's work emphasizes closing the nutrient cycle as much as possible; while some nutrients invariably escape (their selling as food being the point of a farm), modern farming is dominated by inputs and outputs. After importing seed, farmers rely on mountains of fertilizer, pesticides, and antibiotics to bring the crop (be it corn or cows) to its marketable size. Every stage relies on finance and import, and nothing from the farm's crop is used to sustain it other than its sale. Salatin's Polyface Farm is different.

Instead of taking his cue from a machine, Salatin looks to nature. Deeply religious, he sees a providential plan in the design of nature, and holds that any human plan that goes against it will ruin itself eventually; it is patently unsustainable. While the libertarian Salatin disdains the label 'organic', being now a certified label issued by a government he regards with contempt, the approach is nevertheless one inspired by life.  Salatin relies an ecological understanding of plants and livestock to power his farm.  While he never lays out his entire plan of operation in the book, each chapter reveals another element, and taken together Salatin appears a genuine maestro conducting a symphony of  eating and excreting.  Cows graze a field, and chickens follow, removing parasites that spread disease. The cows' winter bedding packs are mixed with corn and given over to pigs to root in, creating compost. Instead of being penned in one place, animals are moved on a daily basis in a simulation of their species' natural grazing patterns.   His animals aren't merely the ends of the farm; they are its means.  Salatin sees them as cocreators, with man and beast working together for their mutual advantage.  Salatin's life-inspired approach applies toward disease prevention;  while the natural parasite removal and mock-migrations do their part, he also employs the time-honored method of selective breeding to produce stock that is robust and naturally disease-resistant.

Salatin has been fighting convention for so long he  embraces it on purpose. This sometimes brings him to the border of quackery, as when he investigates the possibility of a tool that collects 'cosmic energy'  and prevents drought. It doesn't work, of course, and he cheerfully admits it, but he's impressed by the salesman' dousing taking him straight to the spot that Salatin would have picked to stick it. This is an example of being in tune with the land. More skeptical minds (mine) would say it's an example of being cold-read. I would not be surprised if the douser picked up on Salatin's body language that inclined him toward a spot, visual tics that told a sly mind when he was getting warmer to Salatin's ideal spot.  Salatin only prescribes advice that is based on evidence, however, on his careful study of the landscape.

On the whole, Sheer Ecstasyis a fun first look at how agriculture can adapt to sustain itself.

The Small Mart Revolution

The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition
© 2007 Michael Shuman
285 pages

Independence has long ceased to be the American credo, supplanted by another: efficiency. Throughout the 20th century, small businesses supporting towns and families were devoured by larger firms, big businesses who gave little back to the communities they colonized other than an infrastructure burden and a handful of jobs. But Michael Shuman holds that it ain't over yet, and in The Small-Mart Revolution this entrepreneur argues that the titans have achilles' heels and citizens still have a choice.  A combination of economic study and political jeremiad, Revolution is concise and feisty.

Shuman establishes a dichotomy early on; this is a story of TINA versus LOIS.  TINA is the there-is-no-alternative mentality, the approach the United States has taken on in the modern age; it is the path of chasing and relying on big businesses for jobs, of sublimating the local economy to the globe. LOIS is the alternative, the locally-owned, import-substituting approach. Shuman begins with arguments for LOIS against TINA;  not only do big firms invariably disappoint those who hunt them,  accepting tax breaks and infrastructure put in on their behalf, only to skip town when another city offers an even better deal -- but the money they produce is lost to the host community. A Wal-Mart store forwards its take to Bentonville, Arkansas;  it doesn't invest it in local banks, and most of the wealth is spent elsewhere. Money spent at a local firm, however, owed and staffed by locals, is subject to a multiplier effect.  There are other considerations, like the folly of depending on fragile systems for vital resources. Why should a town rely on food shipped in from California when its own fields can produce enough to support the population?  Shuman is not blind to David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage -- that given communities and places are better at doing some things than others, so towns that have fields and mineral deposits might be better off plopping down a mineral-using factory on those fields and having the food shipped in from a place that only has food to specialize in. This makes perfect sense when thinking about people who want oranges in Michigan; the cost of growing them in greenhouses would be prohibitively expensive when they can buy from Florida and California.  But why should people in Alabama buy pork from the Carolinas when only a generation ago, farms that incorporated livestock and agriculture were the norm?  There are factors other than cost to consider, writes Shuman;  shipping food from one side of the continent to the other is a waste of resources and an abusive of the environment, but the chief fact remains that we can't rely on the world's perpetual stability. Sooner or later a  wrench is going to be thrown into the global economy; it may be a financial crisis or peak oil,  but disruptions are inevitable. Centralization can be efficient up to a point,  but decentralization is the option for health and safety.  Reinvigorating local economies will not only restore vitality to our communities, but is prudent for national security as well.

All that is easy enough to say, but how is it to be done? Sure, a city in Alabama can buy local food --but local shoes? Local computers?   For Shuman, the purely-local economy is a hopeless ideal;  he doesn't wholly condemn big businesses, either,  but regards dependence on them as folly. If lessons can be taken from their business practices, so much the better, but his mission is to restore vitality to local communities, an impossible task without restoring the local economy. After making his initial case, Shuman offers advice on how citizens, small businesses, public officials, national leaders, and even globally-minded persons can rely on and expand local economies.. Chapters are committed to each, and end with a list of actions each kind of activist can pursue.  Individual steps are obvious; visit farmers markets, use local hardware stores, invest money in credit unions -- but business owners can ally together in cooperatives to gain some of the advantages of the Goliaths without compromising themselves or their places. Shuman also explores territory outside the usual advice by urging people to invest locally,  something not easy given legal structures that favor the New York exchange.  Dismantling the obstacles to helping big business flourish, from zoning laws to financial support for corporations that are wealthy enough to pay for their own parking lots, is also key.

This is in short quite an interesting book, of considerable interest to those concerned about the wellbeing of their communities, especially their economies.  While no community will ever stop participating in the global economy so long there is wind to fill the sails of ships,  providing more needs locally is a surer course to  curbing high unemployment and staying adaptable than TINA. Prudence is demanded, but Shuman offers ways we can restore communities without falling too much afoul of economic reality.

Related:
Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn. His blog has commented on growing local jobs rather than
Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale
The work of Wendell Berry, especially Home Economics
Suburban Nation,  Andres Duany et. al
Eaarth, Bill McKibben

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
© 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe        
 500 pages

Written as an indignant response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Uncle Tom's Cabin shook the American landscape in the mid-19th century as few other novels could. A sounding condemnation of slavery, popular conception holds it responsible for fomenting a more strident attitude against slavery in the north and giving the Republican Party its great foothold in American history.  Still controversial today for not living up to 21st century mores, Uncle Tom's Cabin remains a beautiful morality play.

I entered Uncle Tom's Cabin with reservation, thinking it a propaganda piece considering that the author never journeyed into the south herself. Admittedly, it was propaganda the south had coming, but I'm not much for polemics whether they come in nonfiction or fiction. Uncle Tom's Cabin, however, is far more nuanced than I expected.  The story begins when two slaves, Harry and Tom, who are sold by their reluctant owner when his gambling debts erase all his other alternatives. Harry's mother is horrified to learn that her handsome young son will be separated from her, and flees with him north, across icy rivers hoping to find sanctuary in Canada.  The other, Tom, realizes that if he runs, more slaves will be sold and separated from their families to make up for the loss.  In what will become a recurring pattern, Tom sacrifices his own wellbeing for the sake of others, and is sold 'down the river'. Removed from Kentucky's comparatively lenient slavering practices, Tom soon finds himself in the deep south, subject to the worst of human nature. Though it is tempered by meeting people of goodness and mercy, what truly sustains Tom is his Christian faith.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin is at the same time an abolitionist argument and a work of Christian evangelism. The two for Stowe are one and the same. Just as Tom urges one fellow slave or master after another to admit to their sin's slavery  and subject themselves to Christ, Stowe urges her countrymen to admit to slavery's sin and embrace emancipation and colonization.

Stowe’s attack on slavery plays on both reason and the emotions. Throughout the novel, characters are cold-bloodedly separated from their loved ones, including mothers and small children, if the profit motive dictates, and the slave traders are as calculating as can be,  thinking about their slaves as nothing but cattle. Various characters against slavery, and others defend it.  Stowe is fairer to the south than expected; her novel’s most loathsome character is a northerner with a plantation, and  the two other white slaveholders who receive the most attention are utterly decent. Northerners are hypocritical idealists who don’t realize the sin of slavery is on their hands as well.  This harshness is presumably less to soften the blow against the South than it is to prick the northern conscience and call it to action.

 Although its now-dated language and attitudes toward slaves no doubt annoy the modern mind, Uncle Tom’s Cabin rises beyond such petty complaints. This is a story of redemption, of how a man can be bound in body, but not in spirit; degraded by law, but not in person. Just as Harry's mom Eliza  Eliza finds defense for her body in flight and arms, Tom finds defense for his spirit in acts of love;  ultimately he becomes a Christ figure – certainly for characters within the text, and perhaps Stowe hoped, for the American people as well. It's an outstandingly beautiful novel.

The World Until Yesterday

The World Until Yesterday
© 2012 Jared Diamond
481 pages

            Earth has been the province of mankind for hundreds of thousands of years, and for most of the time he has transversed it in small tribal groups, hunting and foraging, living a life on a knife-edge of danger. Several thousand years ago, however, cities and farms appeared, civilization flourished, and the human race filled the globe, teeming into the billions.  Despite that vast difference in accomplishment, however, Jared Diamond holds that traditional societies, for all their tribalism and perilous lives, have much to teach modern man. For despite centuries of technological and social evolution, our bodies are as they were eons ago, and the great horde of wisdom contained within old tradition has not lost use.  In The World Until Yesterday,  Diamond surveys the practices of traditional people throughout the globe, predominantly in Africa and southeast Asia, for what they may yet teach us.

             Elements of Until Yesterday have been given consideration by others; witness the primal movement and the more widespread paleo diet, which hold that since our bodies evolved for the small-village, hunting-and-gathering lifestyle, our minds will feel more at home, and function at their best, recreating that behavior. It's easy to agree to a point;  few would dispute that apples are better for you than AppleJacks, or that daily exercise is more healthy than spending all day in chairs or couches. Diamond's own approach is more nuanced and pragmatic rather than idealistic. Modern approaches are still new, very much wet-behind-the-ears. Traditional approaches are more seasoned, more mature, and their experience  can be used to temper our novel approaches, combing old wisdom with modern power.  One example of this Diamond uses is that of the legal structure;   western law has its place,  but something is lost from the old ways in which criminals were confronted by the victims in a court of those who knew them, and forced to make personal restitution -- instead of being tried, defended, and judged by strangers,   then thrown into a prison where their crimes lose all significance, lost in a sea of others.  The victim, meanwhile, is expected to be detached, surrendering their pain and lust for justice to the impersonal apparatus of the state. But the law cannot feel, it cannot bleed, it cannot flush with anger, and it cannot substitute impersonal punishment for personal crimes. 

       Until Yesterday quickly drives home the point made by other anthropologists that “humans have found many ways to be human”.  A tremendous variety of practices exists between traditional societies, even between those living close by as in on the island of New Guinean.  A grisly example is that of elder ‘care’; while some societies ritually kill the old, others simply abandon them. Yet in most, the aged are revered, not only because the stories and functional knowledge of the tribe are contained within their heads, but because their long practice makes them master craftsmen, and even when their physical bodies deteriorate they can still care for children, leaving adult parents to hunt and forage.  The book’s scope covers justice, war, childrearing,  gender roles,  the elderly, health. and more, but each category bears witness to the glorious diversity of mankind.  Some lessons are familiar, as with health. Some were forgotten by most, but live on in others, like educational approaches;   which is more productive, Diamond acts, sitting in chairs all day memorizing facts, or experiencing the world directly? Opponents of conventional schooling, especially the unschoolers, know how important tactile and immediately-relevant lessons learned are. Traditional children learn to make the tools they will need to live by, and study the animals and rhythms of nature that sill sustain them;  they absorb the stories of the past that inform them of the dangers to come.  Their tests are not academic exercises.  Still other lessons have been lost to us entirely;  in the developed world, living amid plenty in environments divested of all predators and woes, we have become so blind to the thought of a dangerous world that we cross streets with eyes locked on phones, texting and assuming traffic will stop around us. For traditional peoples, however, the world is alive with danger, from animals who can easily  eat your young, or tribal enemies who will do the same if you trespass.

      The World Until Yesterday has much to offer, even with Diamond's thesis aside. It is if nothing else a survey of over a dozen distinct tribal cultures, all providing a wealth of fascinating, living in climates as disparate as the frozen Arctic sea  and the equatorial jungles.  They display how utterly different the human experience can be from the global sameness of modern living; each tribe faces different challenges,  hunts different prey, makes different adaptations.   Diamond's idea does hold, however, that there are lessons to be learned here, that the way we do things presently is not necessarily the most productive or satisfying way. There's much about traditional living no sane person would invite back -- the constant threat of famine, the utter lack of medicine -- but these people are wily and strong, firmly connected one another and committed to their families in ways few moderns can rival.  At any rate, the book offers insight without prescription,  not preaching but demonstrating and leaving it to the reader to consider.



       

Power, Inc

Power, Inc: the Epic Rivalry between Government and Big Business
© 2013 David Rothkopf
448 pages

     

Historians of western civilization are used to viewing its late medieval and early modern period through the lens of a church versus state battle; the reformation owes as much to the desire for German princes to be free of the Roman pontiff’s command as it does belief  in theological purity.  Concurrent with the battle between Crown and cathedral, however, was another war; one between the crown and commerce. In Power, Inc, Alexander Rothkopft gives a history of the modern world, of the economic tides that eventually created polities greater than many states: corporations. The history, which covers economic entanglement in wars of the period as well as the evolution of Law, doubles as a plea for sharper control of corporations by the government. 

      Although Rothkopf draws on a variety of examples throughout the work, his anchor is the Stora corporation. Granted a charter in 1347, what began as a copper-mining operation turned Sweden into a power to be reckoned with during the Thirty Years War, but outlived its beneficiary by continuing to adapt to the modern world long after Sweden had been overshadowed once again by Germany, France, and England.  Although the economic forces unlocked by the scientific and industrial revolutions were initially used primarily for the benefit of the king,  governments soon lost control; the developing rule of law in modernizing country soon triumphed over the king's will, but instead of protecting all parties the law  in America eventually became the faithful servant of corporations. Granted fictional personhood, and all the rights (but none of the responsibilities) thereof,  corporations became 'super citizens' whose globetrotting power now rivals the majority of nations. Loyal to none and increasing free of legal restraints (courtesy of globalization),  their might has prompted nation-states to adopt their methods   But countries are not businesses, and if maximizing economic profitability becomes the standard for good governance we will be in a bad way, riven even more by inequality and utterly beholden to economic titans.

     Power is organized smartly,  linking a breadth of information;  this is a lesson in the rise of the rule of law from military might and kings as well as the tale of the global economy's transition from medieval marketplaces to fiendishly complex financial markets.  The golem-like creation of corporations delivers appropriate horror, but Rothkopf sees the battle between states and corporations as one sided, with corporations cast as the villains and governments diminished victims. Although he mentions the revolving door that sees corporate executives occupying seats within the government 'overseeing'  the businesses they once worked for, and will again when they are out of office,  the way government is used to increase the power of corporations -- through subsidies, or through legislation that smothers smaller businesses but leaves the big-business beasts intact --  are absent altogether. Sterner regulation, even when applied through global bodies, will only lead to more of the same. 

Power, Inc doesn't quite live up to its name  in giving an account of people being pawns between government and business, but it does offer a look as to how corporations are becoming utterly lawless in the global era. 

Related:
No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, better anti-corporate books by Naomi Klein

Anthem

Anthem
© 1938 Ayn Rand
128 pages

In a dark future, the triumph of collectivism has created a global society deteriorating to near-medieval conditions.  Man is utterly broken by the state, dominated by institutions from birth onward. Raised in cohorts in government offices, not by families,  children come of age at fifteen and are assigned their lot in life by the governing authorities.  They toil as drones for the next thirty years before being consigned the House for the Useless, where if they are lucky they will find some meager pleasure in the social programs before being execution as a burden to society.  The state and society are all, so triumphant that even the pronoun "I" has been extinguished.  The human spirit, however, is irrepressible.

Equality 2521 is a sinner in the hands of a suffocating state, a young man who yearns to study the ways of the world and perhaps even to become a scholar, but who is consigned to be a street-sweeper. After stumbling into an abandoned subway tunnel, Equality finds himself for the first time alone, and there in the dark with just his thoughts for company, a psychological journey begins. The tunnel, which he and a couple of sympathetic friends keep hidden from everyone else, becomes their sanctuary, a place for Equality to read books and experiment with the things he finds in the rubbish, a place where he eventually discovers that there are things not written in the Global We's philosophy. There is Electricity, and if he can realize its power he can make the world a better place. Breathlessly he takes his findings to the convention of Scholars, who promptly imprison him for many manifold presumptions (among them, threatening to put candle-makers out of work). Happily for him they are incompetent at incarceration, since so few people have ever rebelled against them, and soon he's escaped to make his fortunes elsewhere.

Anthem is a short work, a novella of no more than 90 pages; I read it chiefly because it was available for free on Amazon, and the delicious irony of something of Rand's being offered for free was too good to pass put. Altogether it's the tale of an individual's self-realization, his struggle for consciousness. Eventually he does, and as in 1984 his rebellion is urged onward by forbidden love for Liberty 5-3000, and given safe harbor by the wild;  the rugged forests outside the bleak We-ruled cities are teeming with life and energy. But among the wild are grown-over homes, and inside them books which reveal how much was lost.  Ultimately Equality and Liberty shed their old identities and emerge as Individuals, and  here the book descends into preaching.  All of the lost passion of twenty years comes bubbling up into Equality's realization that the individual is sovereign, the individual makes the world, and so carried away by it is he that when Liberty professes, "I love you," he replies with a half-page speech about the importance of names and the individual.

I have never Rand before, and will own a bias against her, one I've had since listening to a radio interview with her years ago. Even so, I enjoyed this work for the most part; any tale of man versus the state, of  the natural vs. the contrived, is sure to win me over despite the overweening pronunciations of the last few pages  Considering  that the union of the happy couple results in a pregnancy, there is hope that the book's heroes will learn what the childless Rand never did, that people are born into society as surely as fish are born into the ocean. It is a society of the family, however, a natural one, where we are reared by the bone of our bone and the flesh of our flesh, not an artificial and imposed "Global We".    Even so, this is a fascinating little book, well worth the time spent reading it; regardless of my animosity toward Rand's praise of selfishness, hers was a quick and artful pen.  The similarities between this and 1984 make it a beacon of hope after Orwell's singularly depressing work about the triumph of the state.

Related:

• 1984,  George Orwell
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Human Scale

Human Scale
© 1980 Kirkpatrick Sale
500 pages      

      Human Scale is an ambitious assault on big business, big government -- the very concept of Bigness. Opening with biology, Kirkpatrick Sale first establishes his basic operating principle:  for everything, there is a limit to its size beyond which it cannot grow without being compromised. In its opening third, Human Scale addresses the problems inherent in large, complex systems, then follows that with sections on how society, economy, and politics might function more effectively if scaled down.  On the hefty side itself, Human Scale impresses with its thoroughness; a kindred spirit to E.F. Schumacher's small is beautiful,  the book has largely stood the test of time in putting forth a case for decentralized politics, appropriate technology,  organic locally grown agriculture, and cities and buildings built to the human scale.  Sale creates a synthesis from topics as varying as demographics and aesthetics.. It is at times dated, at least in its optimistic projections for solar energy efficiency.  On the whole, however, it offers insight into government dysfunction and widespread social problems, along with ways people can work to effect change themselves. It is almost an anarchist how-to, a review of ways people can reclaim their lives against the power of centralization, and its enduring relevance is proven in the multitude of authors still advancing its ideas, a number that includes Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry.

I'll Take My Stand

I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition

© 1930 various authors.

410 pages

 "There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called The Old South...Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow...Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their ladies fair, of Master and of Slave.Look for it only in books for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind.

For most the Roaring Twenties were a celebration of the triumph of progress. The Great War in Europe was over, and its conclusion saw many of the old empires and forces of conservatism defeated by the liberal-democratic allies (or in Russia’s case, by soviet revolutionaries). In America, business was booming; the cities were swelling with people streaming in from the impoverished countryside, going to work in factories and celebrating American triumphs in war and peace by purchasing as many of the new gadgets that filled the stores as they could, and using credit to acquire those they couldn’t afford. But in the late 1920s, on the precipice of the Great Depression, twelve men of letters looked to the future and saw a vision of despair: the Old South’s final defeat by the forces of modernity, and with it the loss of genuine civilization.  I’ll Take My Stand collects essays defending both the South as an entity apart from the rest of the American nation, and the agrarian system of life that for so long was its defining characteristic. Nearly 85 years after its release, their  fears have been realized. Southrons are just as removed from farming as any other Americans, and the interstates  and cookie-cutter subdivisions have reduced the southern aesthetic into the same bland sprawl that plagues the rest of the nation.  Their call to arms urges a defense for a way of life that is now passed. I'll Take My Stand remains of value to modern readers, however, in offering  both an appreciation of the Old South's culture beyond stereotypes and a critique of the automatic cheering-on of anything called progress.

I first heard of the 'Southern Agrarians', the symposium gathered here, in Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, and the books are of like temperament in promoting an measured conservative response to cultural change.  Both look for inspiration in tradition, both the rich intellectual, moral, and artistic traditions of the west, but are averse of the modern embrace of the conservative label with the forces of big business.  The gentlemen gathered here are most certainly not fans of business;  they are 'men of letters', intellectuals and artists, who share the old gentry's contempt for the naked materialism of business. A farm is a place to grow corn, not make money, one writes. The authors and those who they look to for inspiration, men like John C. Calhoun, believed in a 'graceful' life;  one supported by work, of course, but devoted not to profit but to the pleasures of a good life;  time with family, living out old traditions;  the art of conversation; music,  and art.  Where Kirk and the Agrarians differ is emphasis on farming;  the southerners see the South's agricultural basis as vital to maintaining civilization, which draws wisdom from the seasons to realize there are limits to everything, and a time and place for everything under the sun.  The north, with its towns and factories, long abandoned the settled wisdom of Europe, which then lived on in the South, wrote the authors; they were given way to madness, to pursuing phantasms.

All this sounds rather lovely, but  the appeal of their Southern Civilization is itself limited; although they look with fear and contempt upon the centralization of wealth in the north, they defend it in their own massive plantations. Farms function better at that large scale, one writes. The virtue of economics vanishes, however, when it threatens them, and the fact that a factory can produce goods more efficiently  than a homestead is dismissed as being beside the point.  That's not to say the agrarians are hypocrites; another praises the Gracchus brothers, the classical heroes of the left, who wanted to break up Rome's great plantations and restore the land to the common man. They are twelve individual authors of varying sentiments and approaches; most write conventional essays, but two tell stories that illustrate the points they intend to make. On the whole, however, they lean toward  'elitism'; this is not just implied given their praise of a life of culture and leisure practiced by very few (yeoman farmers given passing mention, but), but in their disdain for the masses.  One dismisses the people as superstitiously religious Anglo-Saxons who need guidance, as if the southern gentry were Norman lord. If they have that level of disdain for the Saxons, woe betide the Scots-Irish working poor! There's also the matter of race and slavery. Slavery is not quite defended, but blows against it are certainly cushioned as the institution is described as obscene more in theory rather in fact.

I'll Take my Stand is a difficult book, not so much for its writing (some pieces lean toward the abstruse, but not most)  or its arguments, but for those old biases. These are not twelve members of the gentry writing, but intellectuals, and even though some of them rose to culture from farming stock,  their vision of the past is more idealistic than an argument for restorative action can be based on. It's intellectual and cultural history with a little too much romance, rather like the opening of Gone with the Wind which is quoted at the lead.That farming has become the province of industrial corporations is a severe loss for the American people; that our cultural links to the past, in the form of tradition, has been shredded is likewise a tragedy;  we live in an age where home skills like sewing and canning are taught not by family elders, but by government bureaucracies. Yet these arguments will not take root in the modern readers' mind, accompanied as they are by noxious weeds like elitism.  It's a shame, too, because many of the ideas expressed here ought to be considered, especially the notion of a simple life versus one of acquisitive materialism. Given that such ideas are argued in other books, by less impeachable authors,  I'll Take My Stand's greatest enduring appeal is in the area of intellectual history, of understanding the southern mind as it attempted to find the best response to industrialism pushing its way under the Mason-Dixon  line.

Related:

• The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk
• Any of Wendell Berry's books on agriculture or economics, including: The Unsettling of America, The Gift of Good Land, What Are People For, and Home Economics. 

 

The Long Loneliness

The Long Loneliness
© 1952 Dorothy Day
288 pages (Harper Collins, 2009(

            Dorothy Day came of age amid the Great War, a child of struggling parents whose labors to make ends meet stayed with her even after they had achieved some success. Caught up by the social upheaval of the early 20^th century, Dorothy moved among the ranks of Communists, anarchists, and draft-resisters. Her determination to fight for the poor changed directions after she joined the Roman Catholic Church, however, and in The Long Loneliness she recounts the efforts of her comrades, both radical and Catholic, as they worked to create a better world for the impoverished. Day’s autobiography is a beautifully written response to the early 20^th century’s social turmoil, the story of a hell-raiser on the verge of sainthood. 

            Although overtly pious as a child, Day recounts here falling away from religion as she aged;  what did faith have to offer the poor, she thought, except meaningless promises of a happier afterlife?  Why should the impoverished and oppressed remain meek and serene when they could throw off their chains? Dismissing religion as the opiate of the people, Day recounts how she threw herself into the struggle for social justice. Her faith in inexorable progress was tested, however, during repeated periods of imprisonment, periods which she worsened by engaging in hunger strikes. In the despair of those hours she turned again to the God of her childhood, and when she was finally set free,  her Christian faith would be reborn and strengthened. Ultimately,  her yearning for comfort and  order led her to the Catholic church, and so strong was her desire for inner peace that she converted despite knowing it would mean leaving her common-law husband, who refused to submit to a church marriage. 

            The Long Loneliness is by no means a comprehensive biography; even if Day were blessed with total recall, constructing a narrative means leaving some facts behind to focus on others.  From this account she seems to have accepted the Church on its own terms, rather than being able to embrace it after learning about its social doctrine, which is by no means passive concerning poverty. I suspected the social doctrine might be the  draw for her, but she gives it scant mention and indeed passes over a discussion of Distributism. Instead, she mentions its similarity to the Southern Agrarians and similar movements as her own. The distributist ideal is hers, “a world where it is easy for people to be good”, where people are not destroyed by their work but ennobled by it. There is no escaping poverty in The Long Loneliness, either material or spiritual; it is to escape spiritual poverty that Day finds herself almost revering the material. She and her great ally, Peter Maurin, both emphasize voluntary simplicity as a means of not only focusing on what really matters, but in saving money to create self-reliance. “Self” is misleading, however:   The Long Loneliness is often a book about creating community.  Her rich collections of her neighbors, regardless of where she moved,  and the emphasis she and Maurin both place on experience life communally – through group discussions on philosophy, or establishing cooperatives and charity houses – demonstrate how  vital being with and working with others was to her life, to her worldview.  Day’s journey here ends on a farm, where she, Maurin, and other staffers of The Catholic Worker would be self-sustainable, she writes, if they did not give so much food away.  

            What a fascinating work this is, quoting from church fathers and personalities like Emma Goldman in the same breathe; what a life she lived,  as a journalist and nurse and agitator during a most interesting period of the 20^th century, when workers were brawling in the streets with the forces of  establishment and winning victories even as they were imprisoned and beaten en masse. Many of the  laws they fought for, Day writes, are now on the books.  At the time of this writing she was no doubt by what had been achieved, not by her but by the people she served, the people who took the ideas of The Catholic Worker – pacifism and libertarianism among them --  and spread them across the world.  Hers is a dream still unrealized, but a life such as hers is a testament as to what is possible. 

Related:

• A Life of Her Own, Emile Carles. Also the biography of a driven young woman whose response to seeing her village and its boys swallowed up by the national government during the Great War is to become increasingly sympathetic toward anarchism and the libertarian left. 
• The Story of my Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi, which also ends in a newsletter staff being run from a communal farm. Pacifism and self-reliance are also common motifs, though Day is more sensual.
• Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, Shane Claiborne, whose 'new monasticism' brings Day to mind..
• I’ll Take my Stand, various authors. She frequently mentions the southern agrarians who penned their defense of a culture rooted in the land.
• Red Emma Speaks, Emma Goldman