The Coronavirus in Kansas: Wichita's Weaknesses and Strengths

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, it's sometimes easy, here in Wichita--a large city nonetheless somewhat isolated and disconnected from the larger metropolitan areas of the country, a city which centers a largely rural and therefore much more low risk part of the state--to be unclear if we're overreacting or not reacting enough.But feeling as though we’re stuck in the middle, feeling divided, is nothing new for a mid-sized city like ours.

In general the news for Kansas overall seems to be pretty good. It is looking like the spread of the virus, as it peaks in April, won't be as deadly as we feared, almost certainly in part because of Governor Laura Kelly's (and locally, Sedgwick County Commissioner Lacey Cruse's) insistence on pushing for stay-at-home orders as early as possible. But is it true that, in taking these actions, Wichita will suffer even more than it would have had the city, and its surrounding county and state, not shut things down? Obviously you can find folks who self-righteously insist upon just that. The evidence suggests otherwise--but all the same, there's reason to worry. My best guess, on the basis of both observations and ongoing research, is that Wichita, and most of our state generally, will be able to weather this month, and the next, relatively well--but that rebuilding afterwards may be confronted with some real difficulties.

On the positive side, comparative data provided by Wichita State University shows that, as Kansas’s economy is generally much less dependent upon service, entertainment, and tourist sectors than is the case elsewhere, we haven’t seen quite the same level of job losses and business closures statewide. The mainstays of Kansas’s economy–food production, manufacturing, education, and health care–are broadly considered essential, and thus have mostly been able to continue to operate.

That’s no comfort, of course, to the many Kansans who are suddenly facing unemployment and real economic distress. Nor does it lessen the fear which so many of us have here about the possible loss of so much that adds to the quality of life here in Wichita–the restaurants, the theaters, the bookstores, the "third places," and so much more. And that is what puts a question mark beside this otherwise good news for the folks in this city--Wichita is actually enough of a metropolitan economy that it does, in fact, include significant service and entertainment sectors. Not nearly what New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago or even Kansas City has, of course, but still, enough that, as the Wichita State study shows, a few of the negative economic effects (like regarding air travel) which are below the national average for Kansas, are slightly above it for Wichita. Not much, but slightly. This is why it is vital for Wichita to take seriously questions about how to keep money in the pockets of as many Wichitans as possible (providing maternity leave for city workers whose vacation and sick leave are being used to help support their fellow furloughed workers is one good idea) that probably aren't even on the radar screen in many smaller cities. Small actions, such are withing the jurisdiction of the mayor and the city council, may make all the difference in enabling Wichitans to enjoy the same lower level of economic pain and disruption which will likely characterize the rest of the state for the duration of the pandemic.

Something similar might be said regarding psychological pain and family disruption. Nowhere in Kansas--and certainly not even here in Wichita, the largest single city in the state--do we see the kind of urban density which characterizes those cities that have seen the largest outbreaks, and thus have had to take the most extreme actions for the sake of public health. But even if such measures become necessary here--and again, given the success that we've had in flattening the curve they hopefully will not be--they still wouldn’t play out the same way that they have in larger urban agglomerations. Simply put, Kansans--and Wichitans too--generally have easy access to rural space. When it comes to mental health and minimizing domestic conflict, that matters. As one writer suggested in The New York Times, social distancing in an environment when families have gardens, fields, and locally grown food readily available to them, is a very different prospect from social distancing when three people in a cramped downtown apartment have to maintain 6 ft. distance from one another, and when even the parks and sidewalks are often so crowded with people trying to find some openness that they become sources of stress and have to be subject to further regulation.

In a way, it might be Wichita's very in-betweeness which will make this city a real model insofar as such matters are concerned. We have a genuinely large population with a low enough level of density that nearly all of its residents can take advantage of rural space for physical and mental rejuvenation relatively easily. That's not to say that there aren't problems which some Wichitans could face in this regard; one may think of transportation and access to some of that (mostly privately owned, and sometimes fiercely patrolled) open space, particularly for poorer Wichitans in the downtown and southern parts of the city. And of course, the safety and maintenance of the trails and bike paths and road shoulders by which we can make use of that space once we get there is a question as well. As city leaders take a look of where to cut costs in the face of the financial hit the city is taking, and will continue to take, one hopes they're recognize that is, also, is part of the value and resilience of the city, and will attend to the costs of those easily overlooked resources accordingly.

Still, in general, it would be fair to conclude that Wichita, and south-central Kansas overall, has available to it the opportunities and the resources keep the economic damage and the social consequences of the pandemic minimal. But that, unfortunately, is not the whole story. We have to think about long-term impacts, and not just short-term ones.

As the same Wichita State study warns, food production and manufacturing in Kansas is heavily dependent upon supply chains in equipment and trade that the overall economic health of the nation effectively determines. Service workers and others who work in more creative or information-dependent sectors of the economy can snap back as soon as paying customers return; the same cannot be said for larger industries that need to wait for raw materials to ship or are dependent upon extended networks of specialized workers. The fact that Wichita, as mentioned above, actually does have a decent-sized service sector, will mean that, as the larger mainstays of Kansas's economy slowly struggle back to life, it may be the collective action of activists, entrepreneurs, and urban creatives in our city that will be end up being essential to whatever support will be needed for workers in the aircraft industry and others in the meantime. Of course, given how much of Wichita's workforce is tied up in heavy manufacturing, which over the past year has already taken many 737 Max-related hits, maybe the best we can hope for is a wash.

Agriculture may be another problem. True, the likelihood of the virus spreading widely in isolated Kansas farming towns is quite small. But as the work force in Kansas’s rural counties is also quite small, and as many of those counties–thanks to Republican opposition to extending Medicaid—lack basic health care resources, even a small outbreak could be devastating. The resulting could be a domino effect, with unproductive or failed farms and feedlots forcing closures in ancillary food industries across the state, many of which are concentrated in south-central Kansas, with Wichita as their hub. Ultimately we may see a hastening of the already underway rural population collapse in western Kansas, with long-term social, economic, and political consequences for our city, as more and more people throughout the region come to Wichita seeking medical care and basic economic opportunities, contributing our aging population and probably not adding much to the overall tax base. It's a good thing that Sedgwick County's population is just over the half-million mark, thereby qualifying it for at least a slice of the $150 billion the federal government has earmarked to help out state, county, and municipal governments; in the months to follow this pandemic, with so many liabilities building up and so much potential revenue off the table, it's going to need it.

As we wait to see what this plague brings into our lives, our task as Wichitans must be to use the resources we have–a large population, one which is likely to find ways to remain relatively stable, socially and economically, in the short-term–to reach out and help make more resilient those places likely to struggle the most as Kansas recovers from this pandemic, whenever that recovery fully comes.

On Dreher's Benedict Option, the Christians and Localists Who Can Live It, and the Ones Who Can't

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Rod Dreher and I aren't close friends, but I've been blessed with the opportunity to associate with and learn from him a handful of times over the years, and like tens of thousands of his blog's regular readers, I've been further blessed by the ideas and arguments his writings have sparked in me--even the writings of his that I've thought to be overwrought, off-the-mark, or just plain wrong. The publication of The Benedict Option, a manifesto that he's been mulling over ever since he first staked out intellectual territory as a "crunchy conservative" more than ten years ago, feels like a capstone to that long intellectual association. I don't mean that to sound like a dramatic conclusion or completion; Rod and I, like many others, will no doubt continue to argue in a friendly way about all these issues for a long time to come. But this book helps me understand, better than I ever have before, a gap which exists between his perspective on what both community and Christianity mean and my own. Perhaps future events or arguments will lead to that gap being bridged, or perhaps they will widen it even further. For now, though, it exists, somewhat avoidable in its breadth, but by no means impossible to speak across. That, too, is a blessing.

I have three points to make about this book. The first is that it's really pretty great. Some chapters are better than others, but all are solid, as much as your mileage of appreciation may vary. (For example, I found chapter 2, "The Roots of the Crisis," in which Rod lays out the whole intellectual history of Western Christendom's rise to and fall from sociopolitical and cultural prominence in 26 pages, a little simplistic and pat, but those who aren't scholars may well disagree with me; on the other hand, I thought chapter 10, "Man and the Machine," was a sharp, haunting synthesis of the many powerful arguments which have been made regarding the "fatal error" of accepting unquestioningly "a world mediated by technology"...though I have no doubt that plenty of conservative Christian couples who only have children thanks to in vitro fertilization will be infuriated by his description of the damaging liberationist logic which he sees that practice as implicitly licensing--pp. 223, 234-235.) Overall Benedict Option is not, I think, Rod's best writing; ideas are most deeply and effectively explored when they are organically revealed in the context of a story, and he did that better when he told the tale of his sister's life, her death, and the hometown they shared in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (a book I couldn't write enough about when it first came out, and which I still buy copies of to give to students of mine as they graduate, marry, or move away), and then again when he wrote a spiritual autobiography of sorts as a sequel, How Dante Can Save Your Life. Benedict Option isn't organic in that sense; while there are stories in it, they are arranged to serve as parts of his argument. Here the ideas, not the stories, come first.

The second thing to say about this book is what all those ideas are for--but in all likelihood, anyone who has read this far already knows the answer to that question. Rod's great desire is for what he accepts as the truth claims and the culturally and spiritually formative power of traditional Christianity to be conserved, in the midst of a world which he sees as denying and undermining the conservation of both of those things left and right. By so doing, Rod argues that the moral stability (and thus the social and cultural stability as well) of Western civilization is at great risk. "We Christians in the West are facing our own thousand-year flood....The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization....This may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world....The floodwaters are upon us--and we are not ready" (p. 8).

So far, so very much like many other reactionary jeremiads, whether from James Burham in the 1960s or from Newt Gingrich in the 2010s. But Rod's great insight, one which he has expanded upon and deepened as he has worked out the implications of being a "counter-cultural" conservative, is that the usual political tools of conservation which many American Christians have trusted in ever since the rise of post-WWII fusion conservatism--namely, using political organizing to capture and then maintain a commitment to the Republican party as a way to defend economic freedom, provide for a strong defense, and codify into law socially traditional Christian moral principles--have utterly failed. Hence the need for a turn to an older strategy--one older, as the above referenced intellectual history implies, than the founding of the United States, and indeed older than the entire post-Protestant Reformation socio-economic project of liberal individualism and moral pluralism. Rod's strategy is one of strategic withdrawal from (which also means, as Alan Jacobs astutely observed, a greater strategic attentiveness to) the ordinary cultural practices of the modern world around us, with the aim of developing sustainable local and communal alternatives to them, as the Benedictine monks of old did in the face of the chaos of the post-Roman world. "American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture...in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears. Could it be that the best way to fight [this] flood is to...stop fighting the flood?" (p. 12).

The idea of recasting a broad social and cultural transition and struggle as something other than a straight-up political battle between interest groups and party factions is hardly new, of course. But Rod expresses the ideal of this old vision--a humble, communitarian, civic, populist, local, familial, and "tending" vision, to use the language of political theorist Sheldon Wolin--beautifully:

Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the mainstream. Turn off the television. Put the smartphones away. Read books. Play games. Make music. Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that already exists. Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department....We faithful Orthodox Christians didn't ask for internal exile from a country we thought was our own, but that's where we find ourselves. We are a minority now, so let's be a creative one, offering warm, living, light-filled alternatives to a world growing cold, dead, and dark....Ceasing to believe that the fate of the American Empire is in our hands frees us to put them to work for the Kingdom of God in our own little shires (pp. 98-99).

Rod's description of "antipolitical politics" is deeply influenced by the writings of dissidents from Eastern Europe during the era of communist tyranny there, Vaclav Havel most particularly. He sees the Benedict Option as a way to talk about Christians building, as Czech and Soviet and other dissidents had to, "'parallel structures' in which the truth can be lived in community," a "parallel polis" for the sake of "establishing (or re-establishing ) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society" (pp. 91-92, 94). What he's talking about is coming to recognize that ordered actions and traditions, routines of integrity and sacrifice and commitment, performed in particular places among a shared community, are valuable in themselves, and not because it may have some practical consequence in the public world. In comparison to the utilitarian and individualistic assumptions of liberal modernity, this is a powerful vision.

It is also, in a perverse way, an appealing one; few are the people who haven't, at one point or another in their lives, enjoyed seeing themselves as the lone sane people in the room, as the brave and necessary and suffering resistance to a malevolent agenda, whether embodied in some ignorant bureaucracy or a hateful boss. But there is a complication which comes relying upon such language: it tends to reinforce a circle-the-wagons mindset, thus making the appeal to an alternative seem more exclusionary than perhaps it ought to be. The attention which Rod--a strong moral traditionalist when it comes to sexual morality, who writes that "the modern re-paganization called the Sexual Revolution can never be reconciled with orthodox Christianity" (p. 197)--has paid on his blog, and in this book, to same-sex marriage, transgender issues, and more, often takes this form. In a response to a review of The Benedict Option by Emma Green, in which she notes that the book provides very little advice on how conservative Christians should deal with "the LGBT Americans they blame for pushing them out of mainstream culture"--something Green correctly observes Benedict Option Christians couldn't avoid even if they wanted to, since there will always be "challenges at the boundaries of sub-cultures," Rod becomes a little defiant:

LGBT activism is the tip of the spear at our throats in the culture war. The struggle over gay rights is what is threatening our religious liberty, putting Christian merchants out of business, threatening the tax-exempt status and accreditation of Christian schools and colleges, inspiring the federal government to order public schools to allow transgenders into locker rooms....Our religious liberty and the doctrinal integrity of our churches, especially our understanding of human nature and the meaning of sex and the family, depends on it.

There are lots of "ours" in those sentences, just as the passages quoted above speak of "we Christians" a lot. Of course, American Christians are Rod's target audience, and he's one himself, so that makes sense. But the more you dig into this book, the clearer it becomes that, as much as what he has to say about liturgy ("corporeality is how God created us to function....liturgies do more than pass on information....they form our imaginations and our hearts"--pp. 109,111), work ("Germany's strict laws mandating shop closing times...make life less convenient for consumers...but...the protection of that regulation....cultivate[s] more balanced, integrated lives for the German people"--p. 178), community ("we have to start locally....in order to know what our neighbors need and want, we will have to be close to them"--p. 95), and technology ("to see the world technologically, then, is to see it as material over which to extend one's dominion....technology as a worldview trains us to privilege what is new and innovative over what is old and familiar and to valorize the future uncritically"--p. 221) may appeal to and positively provoke many, Rod really isn't speaking to all of us Christians. Which leads to the third thing to say about his book: that its persuasiveness is very much dependent upon looking inside yourself, and figuring out whether you are part of its true target audience or not.

Rod writes that the Benedict Option is of crucial importance to "orthodox Christians" (sometimes using a small o, sometimes a capital O) or "believing Christians" or "faithful Christians" or "serious Christians," all of whom "recognize the toxins of modern secularism." But recognizing that isn't probably enough--after all, there are thousands of liberal Christians and others who would readily admit to the role modern secularism has played in robbing American culture of a way of talking about the necessity of justice and the plague of greed. (Think of anything written by Ron Sider or Karen Armstrong or Jim Wallis or dozens of others, or most anything published in Sojourners or Commonweal.) So more specifically, Rod means "faithful Orthodox Christians...theological conservatives within the three main branches of historical Christianity." But even more, it means believers who have "internalized" the "classical Christian view" that "[t]he point of life, for individual persons, for the church, and for the state, is to pursue harmony with [Christianity's] transcendent, eternal order" (pp. 18, 54). But even there we have a problem. At one point Rod refers to Hillary Clinton as someone "deeply hostile to core Christian values" (p. 89)--yet I strongly suspect that Clinton herself (a life-long church-attending Bible-quoting Methodist, one who has frequently spoken publicly about her prayer life) could quickly--and honestly--assent to believing that "the point of life is to pursue harmony with a transcendent eternal order." Rod has long been bothered--and rightly so--by "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism," a sociological label developed to capture the vague spiritual sensibilities held by so many Americans, but allows that even that collection of beliefs includes the conviction that God "created and orders the world" (p. 10). So it can't simply be a matter of affirming the existence of a "transcendent, eternal order"; the Benedict Option is, I think, to Rod's mind, essential to the cultural survival of a Christianity with a very particular doctrinal version of the universal moral order.

The importance of doctrine rears its head when Rod writes, briefly, about my own faith, Mormonism, and some of the ways our congregations work to encourage "unusually strong social bonds" and a "unified community of believers": "The Latter-day Saints (LDS, or Mormons) may not be Orthodox Christians, but they are exceptionally good at doing the kind of community building that...is a vital part of being a Christian" (pp. 131-132). I don't mean to make a big deal out of this generous passage, especially since Rod surely knew that his book would be read by any number of old-school evangelical Protestants for whom Mormonism is a dangerous cult and thus must be discussed carefully. But still: so we're not Orthodox Christians, in The Benedict Option's particular definition of "Orthodox Christians," even though he then goes on to say that we're doing exactly what, in his view, Orthodox Christians in today's secular world should be doing? Well, of course, I suspect he might reply; what you do is important, but so is where you stand, doctrinally and denominationally, when you do it. (Rod's complimentary words attracted some thoughtful attention in Mormon circles, but none focused on this particular point, perhaps mainly because most American Mormons couldn't care less about the doctrinal boundaries of traditional Christian denominations.)

So clearly, Rod's argument does not escape doctrinal presumptions. To his credit, he does not over-emphasize this. On the contrary, he speaks highly of intentional Christian groups which take an ecumenical approach to membership (so long as they "avoid watering down doctrinal distinctives for the sake of comity"--p. 137), and he never denies to those who don't hold to his correct doctrine of the eternal order the right to label themselves "Christians"; he never calls Hillary Clinton an apostate or an anti-Christ, for example. But still, he plainly believes that there are Christians--like himself--whose doctrinal take on "core Christian values" will make them targets when and if religious protections which long sheltered religious traditionalists from the full give and take of modern liberal pluralism are taken away...and then there are those that, for better or worse, are already pluralistic enough that living in a "post-Christian" nation will not be threatening. The Benedict Option is a strategy for the former group.

The clearest way to know if you are in that former group, I think, again comes back to sexual morality, about which Rod has written much and thoughtfully before. "Sexual practices are so central to the Christian life that when believers cease to affirm orthodoxy on the matter, they often cease to be meaningfully Christian," Rod writes, and the greatest example of that heterodoxy, in his view, is the belief that sexuality is subject to individual determination--that it is not essentially a corporeal, or communal, or cosmic, but rather a consumer good: "Sexual autonomy, seemingly the most prized possession of the modern person, is not only morally wrong but a metaphysical falsehood." Hence, the line is drawn. If you are essentially opposed or want to distance yourself from any kind of sexual identity or practice which exists aside from or outside of "the covenant through which a man and a woman seal their love exclusively through Christ," then Rod sees you as likely the kind of Christian that is probably in need to seeking a Benedict Option solution in your life  (p. 197, 200-201). If you're not, though, then the Benedict Option probably won't be necessary.

Of course, ideas have a life of their own, and the fact that Rod's argument for the Benedict Option includes elements that are pretty much incompatible with how my wife and I understand the needs of our family at the present time (for example, Rod's emphatic insistence that "it is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system"--p. 155--really doesn't resonate with us) in no way prevents me from taking inspiration--a localist, communal, tending inspiration--from the ideas Rod presents. But it is, nonetheless, a cause for reflection when one comes across such a stark gap. Alan Jacobs strongly dislikes Rod's tendency to talk about the Benedict Option by way of "tip of the spear at our throats"-type formulations, but he wonders if he doesn't have a motivated interest for thinking that way, and that perhaps Rod and his audience of doctrinally traditional believers are "just better Christians" than he is. Liberal Christian (and liberal Mormon!) that I am--as much as I dislike the baggage carried by those particular labels--I confess: I wonder that as well. But I also wonder if Rod's determination on this point may at least partly reflect a perspective that hasn't yet been fully disentangled himself from the tight political association which right-wing Catholics and evangelical Protestants built into the electoral infrastructure of the Republican party from the 1970s through to the 2000s, an infrastructure that became so second-nature to culture war arguments in the wake of the 1960s that the America-centric perspective it lends to debates over Christianity's doctrines and social role is probably pretty hard to shake.

Two examples from The Benedict Option. While writing about the importance of staying involved enough to fight on a national level of religious liberty guarantees, even while focusing primarily on building up local and familial religious practices and resources, Rod comments that "without a robust and successful defense of First Amendment protections, Christians will not be able to build the communal institutions that are vital to maintaining our identity and our values" (p. 84). There's a lot of sense to that...and yet, it's a comment which he makes immediately after having devoted an entire chapter to thoughtfully (and justly!) praising the Monastery of St. Benedict in Norcia, Italy, as an antidote to the disorder of the modern world...an antidote which exists in a country where, obviously, there is no First Amendment. And yet, they abide.

Another, more relevant, example: Rod writes that "Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male-female pair mirrors the generativity of the divine order" (p. 201). There are fascinating debates that could--and should!--be had here regarding natural law, Platonic philosophy and the Great Chain of Being, the Holy Spirit, the authority of tradition, and the Hebraic core of actual Biblical ethics (Rod insists that real Christians cannot "abandon clear, binding biblical teachings on homosexuality" (p. 213), but surely only the most blinkered devotee of Biblical inerrancy would insist that the traditional conservative condemnation of homosexuality as disordered can be fully elaborated from the seven short verses in the entire canon of the Bible which mention it)...but even setting all those discussions aside, it is worth noting that Rod speaks of "marriage" here--the civic, legal institution--as opposed to "sexual relations"--that is, the practice which impacts directly upon his understanding of the moral telos of our created embodiment. Which prompts the question: even if one accepts "the generativity of the divine order" as a doctrinal, cosmic, anthropological fact, what does that necessarily have to matter for how a society which does not have an established church--and Rod never calls for one!--chooses to legally respond to the reality of sexual pluralism (a reality which Rod does not deny, even going to far as to point out the many ways Christians need to repent of their "rejection and hatred" of gays and lesbians in the past--p. 213)? Yes, yes, there will be marginal cases, issues involving children, involving those who lack material resources and are culturally adrift, involving conflicts over clashing rights in arenas of medicine, education, business, caregiving, and more. I've never denied the importance of these marginal cases (much as I didn't care for much of the baggage attached to the case, I think Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius was correctly decided, and have said so repeatedly). But to take those marginal concerns, and see in them a wave which will flood public Christianity entirely away is, I suspect, to have at least some part of one's thinking frozen in an era when a particular kind of traditional Christian doctrine really did serve as an at least informal civic establishment in the United States, conveying the idea that if the dominant institutions and practices of public life weren't legally shaped around and weren't politically supportive of the cosmic order, the functions of the universe itself would be violated. Well, count me as modern--and, while you're at it, as Augustinian too: I just don't think, even if I believed all the foregoing was true (and I don't, not anymore; I changed my mind about same-sex marriage five years ago), I just don't see our collective individual choices necessarily having such permanent cultural warping effects on the world around us, nor do I see such cultural warpings as disturbing God's sovereign intentions for the universe even one tiny bit.

So I come to the end of this fine and challenging book and have to conclude: Rod's thoughtful and important call for strengthening our families and rebuilding our communities by way of the same rules of attentive withdrawal and humble practice which communist dissidents and Catholic monks alike long exemplified is one that I can be inspired by and learn from--but it's a lesson he's not actually directing it at me. This makes me sad, a little bit: because when I look at the end of the book, and I read passages like this...

The Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real work from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity's big lie: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like (p. 236).

...I think to myself: yes, that's what I want and need. If I am to make rational sense of the fact that I find my soul responding to much of Rod's antipolitical politics, his parallel polis, his localist alternatives, and his traditionalism, will I need, ultimately, a deeper conversion? Maybe. Or maybe not. But in the meantime, I hope Rod never forgets: for all our disagreements (and some of them are pretty huge), there are plenty of capitalist dissidents and liberal communitarians and heterdox Christians and modern pluralists and aspiring "intenders" like me who think you're on to something. Even if you're not talking to us, we're listening, and we like a lot of what we hear, and are thankful for it.

Conservative Wisdom from an Original Radical

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Last Friday, Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society, principal author of 1962's Port Huron Statement (or, if you Big Lebowski fans insist, the compromised second draft), Freedom Rider, anti-war activist, social worker, California state representative for 18 years, author, and all-around inspiration to anyone on the left, visited Wichita and spoke at a local church, as part of our Peace and Social Justice Center's 20th anniversary. What I got out of that visit is that his words ought to be an at least partial inspiration to those on the right as well.

Hayden has, of course, spoken at probably thousands of similar occasions, to millions of people, over the past half-century. And deservedly so: the Port Huron Statement stands, in my opinion, with Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail and perhaps at most only a handful of other documents as one of the truly essential political expressions of the 20th century. I teach the Statement a couple of times every year, and when I do I strive to point my students towards the arguably ambiguous place which its passionate, communitarian, participatory, democratic radicalism occupies in the history of modern progressive liberalism. Today "liberal," when anyone can be bothered to think about the term honestly and seriously, is usually understood to mean the use of the state (its bureaucracies, its technologies, its manpower and money) to promote a kind of positive liberty and general equality. But Hayden and his co-radicals, thinking about the struggle for civil rights far away from their comfortably elite universities in the northern United States, had much more on their minds than vigorous enforcement of the 14th and 15th amendments (though they were thinking about that too):

[W]e are...countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things--if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to "posterity" cannot justify the mutilations of the present. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been "competently" manipulated into incompetence--we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making...The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic....

This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism--the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own. Nor do we deify man--we merely have faith in his potential. Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations....Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.

These young, privileged, and courageous twenty-somethings were doing more than laying out grievances. They were doing something prophetic, responding to the distancing, the conformity, and the apathy which post-WWII suburban wealth and stability had spread across much of white America, capturing and articulating some early whiff of the 60s utopian zeitgeist, one suffused with a spirituality that, even when not fully reflected in the final document or the actions of those who trumpeted it over the decades of activism to come, is undeniable. As Hayden himself put it, both in this reflection here and while talking to me after his presentation Friday night, "the Port Huron Statement wrote us, not the other way around."

Hayden, in speaking and responding to numerous questions (and yes, even in Wichita, KS, there were more than enough of us liberals, progressives, former hippies, Occupiers, and other assorted radicals and wanna-bes and interested others to fill Fairmount United Church of Christ up to the balcony), returned repeatedly to that theme of apathy. The milieu he'd grown up in (like that of so many in this wealthy nation still today) was that suggested to him that it was only crazy, disturbed people, like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye or Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who felt the need to take real action in opposition to the status quo--and yet there was the example of African-American citizens throughout the American South, engaging in sit-ins and protest marches and boycotts, risking their livelihoods and their very lives to be fully recognized members of the American community. They were taking incredible risks--and, from the perspective of decades later, he said he was more convinced than ever that they were capable of taking such risks because they knew how to "take the long view." Not that the didn't have immediate demands; they absolutely did! But they also were part of "communities of meaning" which much of the white consumer-capitalism-created college-educated class lacked, communities that provided them with strength and resources for when things get absurd and "sideways"--which, of course, they always will. He credited his own religious tradition (he was raised in a strong Irish Catholic family) with giving him a little of that, and, Californian that he has been most of his life, the example of the protesting Hispanic farm workers as well. This stronger sense of history--one might even call it "tragic," though he didn't--is something which he feels so much of the progressive left in the U.S. has lacked over the past half-century. Liberals, he said, have too often been oppositionally inclinced and easily frustrated consumers, people who don't how to do the organizing, or to respect and build upon the organizing done by those who have gone before, or to accept defeat and keep on working, confident that the lack of any coherent--much less "rational"!--story of progress in one's ability to govern one's community justly doesn't mean the end of the story. When he spoke about the need to recognize one's limits, to address oneself to those causes which one can most immediately respond to on the ground here in Kansas (or wherever), to be conscious of history, and to reject abstract "hope" in favor of realistic "planning," the man sounded almost Burkean.

Hayden remained humorous and thoughtful and reflective through his presentation, with perhaps his only genuine flash of energy and anger coming when a questioner from the audience confessed that Obama's inability or unwillingness to follow through on certain promises he made regarding civil liberties and the wars in the Middle East (an issue which has had much impact on my own thinking) had "broken his heart." "Don't let him do that!!" Hayden almost shouted in response. He continued: what activists and radicals are trying to do is make change, but when those changes happen they will because millions of individuals and neighborhoods and communities and groups have changed the conversation--"burst the canopy," as he put it--through their own slow, constant activism. To expect change to be quickly delivered through signing an online petition or casting a vote and then nothing else, like buying a jar of pickles at Walmart and getting angry because they taste bad, is just another kind of consumerist apathy--one that the corporate masters of our whole socio-economic and political order no doubt delight it. (On more than one occasion during his presentation, I thought he was about to break into a quotation from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.) He's happy to criticize the President, but as one who fully lines up with many progressive liberal views on environmental regulation and women's rights and more, he's frustrated at the idea that anyone whose vote might have made a difference in the 2012 election might have chosen the Green Party over the Democrats. Not because the Democrats are so great--he ripped into their war record and their dependence on Wall Street money often--but because are part of the conversation. The long view, he insisted, has to be about getting a place at the table, and then doing the deal-making you must when you get there. To make it all a grand, be-all-and-end-all moralistic struggle (he also said he hated talk about "lesser evils"--as if any actual Democrat or Republican in America today, no matter what they vote for or support, should be labeled "evil," in comparison to the violence so common elsewhere in the world!), one that has you shouting in triumph when your bill passes or speaking of being heartbroken when you candidate losses, only shows that your sense of history is in the wrong place: that your focus isn't a family or community that provide real meaning to your life. Political wins, he ultimately implied, shouldn't be nearly as important to us (no matter what the issue) as the communal context that allow us to participate in political contests in the first place.

A few days before Hayden arrived in Wichita a student of mine--a wounded veteran of the war in Iraq, and one who drinks deeply from the wells of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity--saw the flyer for Hayden's visit on my office door, and went on a predictable tear, about how men like him were responsible for the decline of America's greatness and had let loose in American public life a revolution in immorality which our country may never recover from. He was wrong of course--and I wish my student could have been there, as all sorts of folks, from academic eggheads like myself to Mennonite handymen like my friend Leroy Hershberger, were. If he'd come, he would have heard what he expected in terms of policy preferences: Hayden is today, as he was a half-century ago, a crusader on behalf of liberal progressive causes (climate change, the war in Afghanistan, public employee unions, immigration reform, the drug war, etc.), and it would be interesting to talk with him about how his own chosen causes, and the candidates who back them, arguably sometimes complicate his own almost "conservative" insistence upon planning and organizing and working to build communities democratically. But, if my student had been open-minded, he might also have been surprised to hear this man, so long and so thoroughly dismissed as a revolutionary hippie, talk quietly and seriously about the local, and radical, labor of politics, about striving to enable all citizens to be part of the never-ending conversation of government, and about the bureaucracies, the corporations, and commercialism that gets in the way of individuals making such authentic moments for themselves. That's his wisdom; that's his example. And frankly, if you take a look at what the man has represented and what he has accomplished....you'd be hard-pressed to find a better one.

Radical Homemaking, Radically Enriching

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

I first heard about Shannon Hayes work through Laura McKenna's blog nearly two years ago. I was already disposed to like the sorts of localist, agrarian, and traditional causes that Hayes urges us to consider when I first read about her (after all, Melissa and I vaguely aspire to that sort of lifestyle ourselves), but it was Laura's concluding line--"There is absolutely no reason that feminism should mean a devotion to capitalism"--that really pulled me in. When I finally got a copy of Hayes's book, Radical Homemakers, I confess it wasn't what I expected--rather than a serious, theoretically grounded critique of consumer culture, family life, and the structural obstacles that often stand in the way of adopting a simpler, more communal lifestyle, I found an often sloppily researched but nonetheless impassioned instruction manual-cum-rallying cry. A cry and a manual for what? Very simply, for rejecting the economic demands which insist of dual-income households (p. 17), for relearning how to grow and preserve your own food (pp. 78-83), and for refusing the economically and environmentally devastating materialism of modern American life (pp. 93-94). And I thought to myself: now, wouldn't this make for a great Relief Society lesson?

Relief Society, for those who don't know and actually care (a pretty small number, I'll admit), is the historical label given to the Mormon church's women's organization--the general principle being to bring together the women of the church as a charitable, educational, and service unit. The organizing conceit here was, of course, very much a thoroughly 19th-century gendered assumption, an assumption which remains--for good and for bad--a part of Mormonism's official doctrinal rhetoric: namely, that women are more naturally empathetic than men, and so will of course find greater fulfillment through the providing of "relief" to their community and others around them. The history of the Relief Society is, in fact, a pretty fascinating and revealing guide to how the Mormon church as a whole first struggled against, then later struggled to acclimate to, modern American life. But what most attracted my interest was the parallel between, on the one hand, Hayes's (often flaky, but also often insightful, and always passionately and persuasively stated) arguments which reject much our media-drenched, money-and-gadget obsessed consumerist world, and embrace the ideal of the homemaker as someone able to help produce healthy, sustainable, durable goods and services for themselves and their community, and on the other hand, the long-standing Mormon Relief Society practice of "enrichment".

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of putting together a panel discussion (at this conference, with the wonderful people you see on the left) which took off, in many different directions, from Hayes's insistence upon thinking seriously about just what "making" a simple, sustainable, spiritually-edifying "home" truly consisted of. What I wanted to do was plant some seeds of discussion (seeds which grow in surprising directions in Hayes's book), presenting the "home" as something other than a unit of consumption, other than a place where individuals rest their heads and eat their meals and watch their television shows, all of which require ever-increasing (and often debt-driven) economic participation to keep going. In preparation for that, I asked a Mormon audience exactly what kind of "homemaking" and "enrichment" activities their local congregations still participate in, if any. The answers were, to say the least, revealing. And they should be--for some decades, extending for many years out beyond Mormonism's 19th-century pioneer period, the ability to live frugally, to share resources and skills with family and friends so as to become self-sustaining, to basically dissent from the pursuit of wealth and growth, was an unstated principle of a great deal that Relief Society did. Enriching the home meant making it more tendable, more nuturable, more amenable to (one might say more "organic to", but such language is unfortunately foreign to most American Mormons, whether in the 19th century or today) the work and production and play of those who live there, rather than more dependent upon the size of the paycheck brought home and the caprice of the market in general. That distant ideal remains a half-life existence throughout much of Mormon culture (and not just Mormons--Laura McKenna, who confessed herself highly attracted to much of Hayes's call, has made clear her own disposition to the "pioneer virtues" of "making do or doing without" before as well).

Part of this story, of course, can't be told without talking about Mormonism's ultimately mostly abandoned effort to develop a truly alternative--more communitarian, more egalitarian, more localized--culture and economy in Utah. This is part of why I'd love to see Hayes's book be the centerpiece of a Relief Society lesson: because in the mostly conservative, mostly middle- and upper-class white American Mormon church, Hayes's righteous attacks on capitalism as an economic system which drives us to debt and competition, invades the sanctity of the home which consumer values and fears, and commodifies and individualizes our most intimate and emotionally connective choices...well, it might not go over too well. But then again, if it was stated by way of quoting 19th-century church leaders and passages of scripture which make essentially the same point, maybe some real enrichment could be possible.

The other elephant that would be present in the room, which any Relief Society taking up my challenge ought to consider, is why should be the Relief Society that thinks about "homemaking" and "enrichment", as opposed to any of the men's organizations in our church? It's an important question--for Hayes clearly envisions to inspire both partners in any family unit to turn aside from the rat race, return to the home, and engage in the sort of practical work necessary to achieve real sustainability, simplicity, and health. When she rants (and she often does) about how "[w]e have lost the innate knowledge and tradition crafts essential to countless functions for our daily survival, with the end result being a disconnection from our communities and our natural world" (p. 83), none of her words pertain to the female partner over the male, or vice versa. But she's no stupid; she's fully aware of how her call to reject the rewards of the market will go over with most of the second-wave feminists among us--feminists who, she believes, have traded in the birthright of building freer, cleaner, more beautiful and more just homes for the cash rewards of the workplace:

In running the homemaking banner up the flagpole, I understand that I may garner two different salutes--one with a full hand lifted respectfully at eyebrow level, and a second where only a single finger is raised. For generations now, the homemaker banner has come to represent two primary struggles. In the first, the homemaker is viewed as a subservient loser in the battle of the sexes, where a man has presumably gained power over a woman if she stays home. In the second struggle, woman faces off against woman; the struggle for autonomy, self-fulfillment, and economic independence is pitted against society's need for nurturers (p. 23).

Tweak a few words here and there, and you can could find words like these coming from the mouth or pen of any one of a dozen well-known female "backlash" authors, including Mormon ones--concerned women who think, like Hayes, that modern American life and modern American feminism are serving the family wrong. But how many would recognize the way in which these ideologies and practices are disrupting the very simple, very conservative, very traditional ideal of the home? Would they see, as Hayes does, that exploring and defending the construction of the home obliges one to stop thinking so much about the behavior of those within the home--which is their preferred route--and instead to contemplate more about the ugly fact that we our complicit in a system which places a price tag on all those behaviors, both good and bad? Well...maybe if the Relief Society instructor was a particularly good one, they would.

My fellow panel participants opened up the discussion of "making" a home to all sorts of considerations--personal, sexual, and theoretical; they talked about church programs, economic resources, psychological growth, and political justice. I think Hayes's would have been pleased with their "radicalness", even if she might have wondered about some of their conclusions. Asking the questions she asks is, after all, the first step. Now, getting someone to make Radical Homemakers--with all its sometimes-crazy-but-just-as-often-insightful suggestions regarding transportation (p. 126), home ownership (p. 130), health care (p. 139), child care (p. 154), education (p. 160), and savings (p. 176)--a manual for an Enrichment lesson...well, that would be the next one.

Two Articles Worth Reading this Week

Early tomorrow morning I'm off with my oldest daughter to a Girls Camp sponsored by our church. The camp is organized and run entirely by female volunteers, so I'll be playing resident adult male, aka pack mule, for the next five days. I'm looking forward to it, actually; since I have nothing but daughters, I figured familiarizing myself with the rituals of Girls Camp is something I ought to start in on at the first available opportunity, since there's a decent chance I'll be asked to do it every year until our youngest leaves home. This year our oldest is 12, the first year she's able to attend, and so I'm off to the wilds of Oklahoma. Say a prayer that the tornadoes miss us.

Until next week, a couple of pieces worth reading. Both are talking about the same thing, ultimately, and both share far more in common than they disagree upon, though I suspect their authors would be a little nonplussed to find themselves in each others' company. The first is a recent essay in The New Republic by Amitai Etzioni, on consumerism. Here's an excerpt:

What needs to be eradicated, or at least greatly tempered [in our culture], is consumerism: the obsession with acquisition that has become the organizing principle of American life. This is not the same thing as capitalism, nor is it the same thing as consumption. To explain the difference, it is useful to draw on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. At the bottom of this hierarchy are basic creature comforts; once these are sated, more satisfaction is drawn from affection, self-esteem, and, finally, self-actualization. As long as consumption is focused on satisfying basic human needs--safety, shelter, food, clothing, health care, education--it is not consumerism. But, when the acquisition of goods and services is used to satisfy the higher needs, consumption turns into consumerism--and consumerism becomes a social disease....The kind of culture that would best serve a Maslowian hierarchy of needs is hardly one that would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs--the economy that can provide the goods needed for basic creature comforts. Nor one that merely mocks the use of consumer goods to respond to higher needs. It must be a culture that extols sources of human flourishing besides acquisition. The two most obvious candidates to fill this role are communitarian pursuits and transcendental ones.

The other is a shorter, but in some ways wiser, essay by Mark Mitchell, talking about gratitude in Front Porch Republic. Here's the best passage:

Our commercial society, exemplified by but not limited to commercial television, plays an important role in [our] frantic lifestyle dedicated to getting more. We may watch television for the programs, but the programs exist to induce us to watch the commercials. And the commercials, if they are successful, create in us a profound sense of dissatisfaction. They remind us of all the things we don’t yet have. They seek to convince us that what we have is inadequate, outdated, and ill-equipped to make us as happy as we deserve to be. Commercialism creates dissatisfaction--that, after all, is its purpose--and dissatisfaction is right next door to ingratitude. When we are unsatisfied with what we have, we are constantly thinking about how to acquire those things we think we need. When we are thus consumed, it is difficult to be grateful for the very things we wish so desperately to replace or supplement....When our lives are oriented primarily toward acquiring new things, we will be less concerned with securing wealth to pass on to our children when we die. We will be less willing to give more than a token of our money and time to the poor among us. The ability to do without will diminish and our lack will chafe us, occupy us, and set the direction for our thoughts, our energies, and our purposes. Ultimately, ingratitude leads us to forget God from whom all good things come.

Etzioni, though by all accounts a pious man, would almost certainly never tie his condemnation of our culture of disposability and commodification into the concern that such a mentality takes us away from God, as Mitchell does; by the same (or at least a similar) token, Mitchell, though an able critic of the modern scene, would almost certainly never allow for the kind of communitarian response that Etzioni recommends, allowing that consumer goods, when properly oriented, are part of the solution to keeping consumerism under control in a free society. In the end, what I see in these two think-pieces are mutually supportive arguments about spending habits and living environments and the role of the media and so forth, with one placing most of the burden of reform upon a recommitment to the traditional discipline of faith, and the other clearly most interested in dialogues which will result in changes in social structures and priorities, with both only casually--perhaps even reluctantly--allowing that the other also plays a role.

I don't post these because I have some fine idea about how to merge them together or resolve their differences, nor do I feel comfortable in simply standing back and declaring them both to be correct. (Though I do, generally speaking, think they're both on the right path.) As a couple of lengthy comment threads at FPR that I've been involved in of late demonstrate, there are real faultlines amidst us "reactionaries," as Damon Linker not all that inaccurately labeled us all together (though I would still insist that my kind of populist "conservatism" is actually more left than right), and there's no easy or obvious reconciliation between our views. But for now I say, so what? These kind of deep disagreements are signs of serious engagement, which is a lot more than what the Republican party, at least, can offer the body politic today. So read Mitchell, and read Etzioni, and learn from them both.

Have a good week; assuming I survive without any electricity for five days, I'll see you when I get back.

Food, Farming, and Sovereignty in a (Late) Capitalist World

Two very thoughtful--and very unconventional, by mainstream American political standards at least--self-described conservatives have produced two very thoughtful pieces on food and farming in recent weeks. John Schwenkler--who is becoming a bit of a must-read for those who are interested in what "conservatism" is and where it's going, as I am--has a cover article in The American Conservative this week on why "renewing the culinary culture should be a conservative cause." And Caleb Stegall--my local Kansas populist idol (and sometimes antagonist)--had a fine and lengthy review of Michael Pollan's recent work appear in the independent conservative publication Taki's Magazine a couple of weeks back. Both are pieces that much deserve every thinking person's attention, and both pieces mostly make good sense. Mostly, that is.

John's piece isn't as provocative as Caleb's, but is possibly more important for all that: his aim is simply to get people who describe themselves as "conservatives"--more plainly, anyone who considers themselves a friend of families and traditions and what Russell Kirk called the "permanent things" in life--ought to think seriously about the food they eat, about where it comes from and what it consists of. He starts out discussing how various advocates of local food production, sustainable agriculture, neighborhood gardens and all the rest have often come to the point they're at through what are usually considered to be "leftist" critiques of big business, pop culture and all the rest. But "a closer look tells a different story"; what's really going on in these co-ops and community supported agriculture farms, John asserts, is teaching people "redemption through a deep appreciation for the real, the authentic, and the lasting--for the things that money can’t buy: the very things that matter most of all if we are going to lead sane, healthy, and sustainable lives." In other words, rebelling against big agriculture and fast food is an act of conservation, and thus ought to be a conservative cause.

Now, to anyone who has followed this blog and my frequent preoccupation with Rod Dreher's "crunchy con" movement at all over the years, this doesn't sound at all new; I've been arguing that there is something "conservative"--or at least "illiberal"--to the movement against our corporate-dominated, too-easily-commodified food world ever since I reviewed Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. But while John's main thrust is to make a cultural argument over what he thinks properly should be conservative priorities and practices when it comes to producing and consuming food (a thrust I agree with, and which Michael Pollan, one of the gurus of the movement, agrees with too--see Rod's interview with Pollan in the same issue as John's essay, in which Pollan confesses that "[W]henever I write about food or nature, I feel like I am actually to the Right...the 'Wendell Berry-Michael Pollan Right'"), he also wants to be able to stake a claim for a style of conservatism that is more than traditionalism, a conservatism which partakes of America's "liberal" (or libertarian) contribution as well:

Adopting an alternative view of food does not require rejecting the possibility of a free and prosperous market economy. Indeed, the rise of the New American Diet—meals eaten in a rush and very often alone, made from processed and prepackaged ingredients—was not solely or even primarily the product of Adam Smith’s invisible hand....The substitution of state-sponsored nutritionist technocracy for the collective wisdom of taste, instinct, common sense, and tradition is a perfect example of the triumph of Tocqueville’s feared "immense tutelary power" ("absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild"). The same goes for the extraordinary industrialization and global "flattening" of our culinary economy....Price controls and multibillion-dollar farm subsidies prop up corporate agribusiness and discourage smaller producers from trying to find alternative market niches. Real local autonomy--setting regulatory standards that do not conform to national or international ones, restriction or taxation of imports or exports, and preservation of place-specific forms of agriculture and animal husbandry--is undermined because it makes for economic inefficiency. The natural capacities of location, season, and culture to link people together and shape the ways they farm and eat are countered by artificial measures designed to maximize yield.

But it is exactly these social and cultural dimensions of our culinary economy--the centralization of processing and production into an ever shrinking number of multinational corporations, the incredible distances over which food travels before it reaches our tables (an average of 1,500 miles in the United States), the loss of idiosyncratic foods and food cultures, and so on--that should raise the greatest concerns for traditional conservatives....Hence even the smallest acts of resistance to the hegemony of the present system, where corporate representatives and industry-funded scientists at public universities collaborate with government officials on regulatory policies and nutritional guidelines, are crucial steps in recovering local culture and reconstituting our "little platoons." This will nurture the ability to govern--or resist being governed.

There is much wisdom in that passage, with its invocation of Burke's "little platoons" and its slam on Friedman's "flat," globalized economy. It is properly suspicious of corporations and respectful of localist "economies of place." So what's the problem? Nothing really...except that, in the end, it seems to posit the revival of such localism in terms of "resistance" to a government invariably corrupted by various industrial and "expert" interests. The goal is local "autonomy," which--unless one wishes to get all philosophical and argue over different interpretations of Kant--is, politically at least, another way of saying local "independence." And I've nothing against independence. But an independence that does not address how that locality is not just supposed to become free, but also how it is to be sovereign--that is, able to establish itself, govern itself, exercise authority over its place and build something lasting there--is not really going to be able to pull off the kind of cultural transformation John wants to see happen. He speaks, to be sure, of nurturing self-government, but also of resisting government--which is sometimes necessary, but which also leaves the door open to libertarian assumptions that I do not think are helpful to his--to our--cause.

This is where Caleb's essay comes in. Caleb has sharp things to say about what Pollan gets right, and about Pollan's disconnect from the actual work that farmers do as well. Ultimately, his essay makes the argument which John only gestured at in harsh, polemical terms:

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting of Kansas secessionists [actually, local farmers organizing a farmer's market]. The participants were rowdy, complaining of economic gigantism squashing them flat and bureaucratic thugs hounding their every move....Damned were the federal busy-bodies who tell local farmers what they can and can’t sell; condemned were the centralized agents of agribusiness who want ID chips implanted in livestock; mocked were the credentialed witch-doctors from the department of agriculture who own the brand "organic"....[W]hile there was no Declaration, it was clear that these small growers wanted out--out of forced participation in the economic union of cheap mass production, central planning, credit money, and the ignorant consumerism they despised.

Michael Pollan would understand. His The Omnivore’s Dilemma and its sequel, In Defense of Food, amount to a manifesto for farmer’s markets and locally produced food across the country. Meticulously researched, Pollan’s work chronicles and traces the gigantism that defines today’s food economy--and all the deleterious effects which result....In the wider (or narrower) world of the pundit "food wars"...these discussions tend to illicit either a retreat into faux philistinism or a mockery of the same. Pollan’s own response illustrates this tension well. His conclusions are in fact deeply traditional--one might even venture to call them conservative--a fact he acknowledges, yet one which clearly makes him uncomfortable....

Pollan’s sensibility is that of the kitchen lover--an admirable thing to be sure--but it’s a love that tends to go unconsummated in an age of gentile decadence. He frets continuously over the ethics of killing a chicken for dinner. He admits he is uncomfortable with the conservative culture of the farm. His tentative solutions tend towards state intervention rather than true laissez faire. Honest redneckery comes by dint of sweat on the brow, clods underfoot, and mud on the frock. Down at the feed store, the sun-burned, dirty men I talk to would be more likely to open up a can of whup-ass on Pollan’s hand-wringing self than celebrate his latest gourmand achievement. To bridge this chasm requires a firm recognition that self-provisioning is dirty work done by sun hardened men who obtain not the rarefied sophistication of the credentialed witch-doctors and their organic brews but membership in the rarefied league of freemen who can pretty much tell anyone and everyone, as circumstances may require, to go to hell without concern for the consequences (taxman excepted). That’s the feed store definition of freedom in Jefferson (yes, that Jefferson) County, Kansas, though it’s not taught much in social studies textbooks.

Caleb--brilliant writer and thinker that he is--frames his cri de coeur in terms of secession: secession from modern agricultural and eating practices, secession from a government and an economy of educated experts and high-income industries, and--though he doesn't come right out and say so--secession from the sort of modern life which has been built up through the aegis of such institutions. It's a reactionary call. Now in some ways I find that comforting; critiques of the whole system of modernity are things I'm familiar with, and radical reactionaries like Caleb are hardly advocates of stereotypical libertarian nostrums. But then again, if you're looking first of all for freedom, if you're looking to secede, then you're probably not looking too much to engage, and it is engagement--a taking control of the land and the means and the habits which are our own, and that means political and economic as well as cultural engagement--that is needed here. Caleb mentions "interdependence" at the end of his screed, and interdependence fits much better with what this whole argument is really about than does John's "autonomy," but the context--social, political, and economic--of that interdependence is yet to be struggled with.

I don't want to overemphasize my disagreements with John or Caleb, which are comparatively minor. But still, those minor disagreement can lead to large misunderstandings, and large misappreciations of our situation. What is our situation? We live in a capitalist world, and a late one at that, meaning that the long, fruitful, but also destructive process of specialization has reached the point in the U.S. of leaving us with, as Caleb observes, a population that mostly does not know how to "self-provide," because we live in a world where providing for oneself (not to mention the land and the resources upon which one might do so) has been outsourced, locked away by corporate land-grabs or shipped away or forgotten with the passage of time; the very notion of self-provisioning itself has come to be seen as inefficient and time-consuming and costly, and most of all disrupting--paradoxical as that may seem--to today's culture of the (therapeutic, narcissistic) self. So what must happen is the self must be properly empowered, and that means by getting all our selves to understand their (again, our) connection to communities of agency and responsibility, and that means changing the reigning connections in our modern world so as to make space for such understandings to play themselves out. A simple rejection of modern practices is a good start, but seeing the forces and the history arrayed against us--or, more honestly, the movements and the history which most of us modern American have internalized and embraced to a certain degree--it is probably not enough to plant you own garden, as important as that surely is; you also have to find away to make a community of gardeners matter in terms of how people collective spend and save and eat. The farmers and ranchers that Caleb observed in his essay maybe angry about the world of "bigness" into which they have been thrust, but unless they (or we) remake the big so that it provides a platform and a context for the local and small, no one is going to be building anything that lasts. You may be exercising food and farming independence, but you're not exercising any sovereignty over your local world of growing and consuming--you'll just be working out your own particular "don't tread on me"-type of compromise with the agriculture powers that be. Hence do the "fuzzy-headed Marxists" that John's essay starts out with aim to get their produce and their ideas about sustainable and local agriculture into the public schools, to start reworking the connections and assumptions and practices which dominate our food economy from within. That's the right way to go--maybe not the way all of us want to go or can go, but the sort of way which, collectively, we need to go. I agree with John (and, again, with Pollan) that "libertarian politics [sometimes] makes for crunchy results," but occasional crunchy results to not a crunchy community (locality, polity, whatever--take your pick) make.

This is not an indiscriminate defense of, as Caleb frames it, "state intervention" over "laissez faire." It is, rather, an acknowledgment that the modern state was not simply or entirely thrust upon the sort of self-provisioning citizens he wants to see recreated, but was also accepted and contributed to in its development by many of those same citizens, because (in some no doubt inchoate way) they wanted a chance for their children or grandchildren to become the beneficiaries of specialization, and thus become, well, academics like John and myself. This is not to apologize or excuse the damage that large-scale, high-yield, government-sustained, commerce-driven agriculture has done to the planet's land and our diets (this delightful take-down of the myth of the Green Revolution which John points to, a myth sustained by corporate entities who insist that transforming the world of farming to make it more about monocultural and exportable cash crops than about diverse, locally traded foodstuffs, is a must-read). But it is, however, to note that, for examples, modern cities with modern workforces would for the most part be unimaginable without it. Is that an argument to abandon efforts to rethink all this as impossible? No, but it does mean that we have to deal with the arguments and opinions we have inherited. Six years ago, the wonderful Catholic (and conservative) blogger Eve Tushnet, as part of a wide-ranging and angry attack on the work of Wendell Berry--an attack which praised international trade and the corporations which gave us "butter and disco" (a silly line, I know, but she has a point)--argued forcefully that "cities are among the most beautiful things on earth" and that "[w]hatever the benefits of an agrarian life, I have never yet seen a defense of agrarianism that did not require socialism in order to sustain itself. And socialism spells the end of the very independence and loyalties that agrarians so eloquently praise." I don't think she's right (for the record, in the order she makes these claims, my answers are: no, cities are nice but they aren't the most beautiful thing; sort of yes, a successful agrarian politics does usually involve certain socialist or social democratic socio-economic assumptions; and no, socialism needn't be the death of independence and loyalty). But she is speaking in context of the late capitalist world we have, and that is the world that--unless we wish to endorse Rod's (and before him Alasdair MacIntyre's) "St. Benedict" solution--we have to struggle to exercise, if only in one small place at a time, some sovereignty over...and that will mean government. To quote Patrick Deneen:

Many if not most policy debates today take place within the context of a broad and general agreement that economic growth is the ultimate end of policy. If we began to bring in other human goods that could be considered legitimate--ones that might at times lead to less economic growth--it would be possible to debate some actual policy alternatives. It would be possible to consider policies that would encourage and defend local economic and communal forms of life, rather than what occurs in our current political arrangement, which is almost always to their detriment. Nor is it simply a matter of arguing that we can achieve more robust local forms by reducing the size of Guvment (particularly Federal government). While I would dearly love for this to happen in some nearly unimaginable future, in the meantime one of the main challenges for such local forms are the immense concentrations of power among private entities, corporations in particular. Government had much to do with their ascent; it will have to be involved in their restraint.

What are the policies which "defend local economic and communal forms of life"? Well, populist ones, like the Conservation Security Program which my family's farm makes use of, or the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association which Wendell Berry and others have praised, or any others which have the broad public good in mind. Basically, anything that truly takes seriously the socio-economic context of modern life--diversification, specialization, urbanization, etc.--and attempts to productive engage and discipline it. To me, this suggest looking in particular at those producers who are falling through the cracks--not the small CSA farmers (as important as they are) who survive by tending to mostly upscale and urban markets, and not the owners of huge corporate giants (who suck up far too many subsidies and just need to be weaned out of existence anyway), but those who are working mid-sized farms (perhaps 200 acres, perhaps 1000 acres), who still sell their crops on the open market and still make decisions about what to plant and how to manage the soil and when to harvest themselves, who still can manage the land and pass down that knowledge directly, frequently within their families. It is these mid-sized farms which are most able to produce unique, highly differentiated commodities in sufficient quantities to be able to participate in economies of scale, and it they who are most at risk. We shouldn't just give up on them, and nor should we tell them that they just need to hold on until a hundred million libertarian successions from the modern capitalist order transform their world. Such a response is, in the end, an unwillingness to take on responsibility. And responsibility is one of those Jeffersonian virtues that a close and thoughtful engagement with the world of food and farming is supposed to teach us in the first place.

Obviously, there's much to think and argue about here, and I thank John and Caleb for giving me reason to do so. I've gone on at great length because I always do, and because these are important issues, not necessarily because my disagreements with them are so extensive as to deserve such. As I've said before, if they'll have a traditionalist-socialist like me in their coalition, I'm game.

Friday PSTSS: "I.T.H.O.T.M.O.A. (In The Halls Of The Malls Of America)"

For this Friday, yet another a cappella song, and yet another song about alienation and the modern economy...except this one is by The Bobs, an irrepressible--and peerless, I say--bunch of comedic jazz improvisers and vocalists; and this song, far from exploring the hopelessness which comes when the world passes one by, instead looks joyfully towards all the wonderful ways in which our local mall will serve our post-alienation needs. Sarcasm? Irony? Probably--but find and give this tune a listen anyway (from The Bobs' 1995 album, Plugged), and you'll find yourself dancing to the most delightfully upbeat paen to the salve of mindless consumerism ever written.

I want to fill that empty hole
My pockets are full but there's a hole in my soul
I need a purpose, but I don't know where to look

Then I go to the mall and I go shopping
Maybe I'm buying maybe "just looking"
I hope to find something, I don't know what it is

I wish I knew what I was searching for
In the halls of the malls of America
Something to love, something to adore
I.T.H.O.T.M.O. America

I need to wear the latest fashion
My look should move you to a fit of passion
I want an image, but I don't know what it is

I need to buy a new direction
Please have a sale on human connection
I shop for meaning still I don't know where it is

I wish I knew what I was searching for
In the halls of the malls of America
Something to love, something to adore
I.T.H.O.T.M.O. America

No one to help me, I'm safely enclosed
There's dance music booming -- mannequins posed
No outside weather, no traffic, no crime
Please take my money -- I'm just spending time

I wish I knew what I was searching for
In the halls of the malls of America
Something to love, something to adore
I.T.H.O.T.M.O. America