Home Schooling, Human Capital, Equity, and Christianity

Earlier this week, a friend of mine called my attention to this essay on home schooling in First Things magazine. (Rod Dreher also picked up on it as well.) Actually the essay isn't so much about home schooling as it is a response to a very specific Christian argument occasionally leveled against home schooling, or against those religious parents who choose it for their children. Christianity involves being a witness, this argument goes, it involves being out in the world and striving to bring God's light to it through your own example and good works. Shut yourself off from the world--by, among other things, turning away from the public schools and educating your children in a private bubble of your own creation--and what you've done is abandon a central Christian command. As the author, Sally Thomas, puts it, "Jesus calls us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and how can we possibly be those things if we stay at home all day?"

I've personally never encountered this sort of argument against home schoolers, nor have I ever made it. But my friend rightly thought that it intersected a good deal with an argument that I have made, an argument on behalf of the public schooling ideal which rests upon being actively involved in, and obligated to, the creating and distribution of common goods like education. As I wrote nearly three years ago, while talking about how most of my immediately family has turned to home schooling, "I like the idea of the state being a (partial) agent of education; insofar as the state is the reflection of the collective interest we all have in promoting and sharing certain civic goods with one another, especially the poor and marginalized, then it is an agency worth supporting." Now with two children in the public schools as opposed to just one, and with one of them going on to middle school next year with all the challenges in environment that may bring, I still have to say I like the state schooling ideal. Of course, much of the reason I can say that is because many of the caveats I mentioned in that original post have not yet fundamentally changed: Wichita, KS, is more than five times the size of Jonesboro, AR, but over here on the west side of town, with all the schools our daughters will be attending within easy walking or biking distance of our home and with mostly intact neighborhoods feeding them, "we [still] don't feel as though the public school system, the state educational regime, is such a monolith that one must either embrace it or reject it wholly....it's not impossible to meet with teachers, attend school meetings, volunteer and be part of the whole general project in education--not to say it's necessarily impossible anywhere, but it definitely isn't impossible here." (Maybe I wouldn't say this if we hadn't gotten to know, through church and work, several of the teachers at these institutions in fairly short order--but we have, and that guides our thinking accordingly.) And so I'm still basically making the same communitarian arguments in favor of the public schooling--at least in principle; I would never want to lay down any sort of absolute duties or fiats here when it comes to a family's primary responsibility to the needs of their own children--that I always have. As members of our local communities and as a citizens of a country at least nominally committed to the principle of equality (a principle we all benefit from), doing our part of keep public goods like free schooling available to all is important. And that means being engaged in the state project of making these schools work. So while I don't find myself particularly drawn in by the specific Christian squabble Ms. Thomas describes--that it is foolish and untrue to scripture to suppose that children should be expected to witness in hostile environments to what they believe is, I think, perfectly obviously and in little need of debate--I did feel a need after reading her essay to reiterate my belief in at least the ideal of reaching out from one's own private realm and being part of a larger enterprise, like education.

Except...what if being engaged in public schooling as it exists where you live is not the best way, or even a viable way, of creating public goods? What if there are multiple "larger enterprises" here, and choosing one of them--public schooling--compromises your ability to contribute to others? This is where I find Ms. Thomas's essay really challenging. I can't comment upon or stand on principle in the face of the particular horrors which her oldest child experienced in her years in public school; Melissa and I have always said that the costs associated with trying to do right to both our children and our ideals might easily become too high, and if we ever get the sense they are becoming as high as they were for Ms. Thomas's oldest daughter--third grade sex education classes with animated teddy bears demonstrating coitus would also certainly be a deal-breaker for us too--then family will clearly come first. (Most of my siblings have made just that choice for their own kids already, and while they haven't tabulated the costs with the same sort of communitarian sensibilities that I would have preferred, I don't begrudge them the right to make the choice the first place.) But until and unless that moment comes, I think the general argument for recognizing one's obligation to the larger society remains intact. On the other hand, Ms. Thomas goes on to argue that, as home schoolers, they are anything but selfish--on the contrary, they are doing more for the "larger society" now than they ever could have through the public schools:

For [some] Christians, it’s largely not about whether we’re stockpiling weapons and planning a theocratic takeover of the entire world. Instead it’s about whether, in making idols of our children, we've failed to love our neighbors. In response....I mainly wonder at what point the local public school became the sum total of “the world.” If our children aren't in public school, does it follow that they aren't anywhere at all? I wonder why the public school should be a more “natural” environment for loving our neighbors than anywhere else.

Some people worry about the state of the schools; I tend to worry about the state of the American neighborhood....We live in a city that routinely posts some of the highest violent-crime numbers in the nation. A neighborhood that empties out during the day offers a natural target for break-ins, vandalism, and other criminal activity. The pernicious pattern here, in neighborhood after neighborhood, is that the crime moves in, the people who can move out, and the ones who can’t get stuck with crack dealers next door....One of the distinct advantages afforded by homeschooling is that we are here a lot. It’s pretty obvious that we’re here, too: Our front door stands open most of the time, our lights are on, and the children and I are in and out of the house constantly. The fact that someone’s visibly home on our block means, we hope, that anyone cruising through, casing houses, will discover us and our neighbors to be uncongenial targets.

More important than our value as deterrents to crime, however, is the fact that we’re available to the neighbors when they need us, and they know it. My husband and I have typed resumes, resolved computer problems, and set mousetraps for various neighbors at odd hours. My older children play regularly with neighborhood children and—as is happening in my kitchen as I write—make cookies to take to neighborhood shut-ins....In short, in withholding our children from the public schools, we have not withheld them from the world. And we’re certainly not unusual. Statistical polls suggest that homeschooling families exhibit a higher than average level of community involvement, and my anecdotal experience bears this out. Families we know, for example, regularly serve meals to the women and children who find refuge in the shelter run by the Missionaries of Charity in one of the roughest neighborhoods in our city; the oldest daughter of one of those families has just returned from several months spent working in Mother Teresa’s orphanage and hospice in Calcutta. But even on a more modest level, day in and day out, home schoolers minister to their neighbors. They demonstrate, quietly and consistently, the value of family life, the value of openness to life, the value of investing one’s time directly in the lives of one’s children, to a culture that, in valuing none of these things, has lost its way.

I have to confess that I find that a fairly strong rebuke to the way I interpret my belief in community obligation. Free and universal schooling is no longer necessarily a public good being generated through the concentrated property tax bases and well-trained (and decently paid) efforts and enthusiastic volunteering of intact neighborhoods, teachers unions, and well-connected stay-at-home mothers which it once was. Now, businesses have moved away and wealth has moved to the exurbs; teachers unions are too often decrepit, desperate for bodies and consequently sometimes justly disrespected; and the family homemaker networked into neighborhood organizations is often absent. This creates a massive civic vacuum: I talk about the larger communitarian aspiration behind of public schooling, but what if there isn't a functioning community there to ground it in the first place? What "larger enterprise" should you tend to first: the schools, or the human and socio-economic infrastructure they serve and depend upon?

There hasn't been any blogger whose often antagonistic experiences with the public schools I've read more thoroughly and gotten more out of than Laura McKenna. Her most recent post about the challenges she's taken on for the sake of getting her two boys the best education she can especially highlights a fundamental truth: the public education ideal presumes, and succeeds or fails primarily in accordance with, the availability of people who are engaged because they have time to do so, have the resources to do, and have the belief that doing so can make a difference. "While I am still absolutely convinced," she writes, "that money makes a difference in schools, so does human capital. Active, annoying, assertive parents make a difference, and those parents are concentrated in high socio-economic towns and neighborhoods. For those of us who are concerned about equity in schools, this is a harder problem to overcome." Indeed it is. I have to ask myself, what is the point of implying that public schooling ought to be such a prominent ideal, something that ought to demand the allegiance and involvement of every citizen of the country, if said schooling is to be acknowledged outright as wholly unequal, with its inequality following precisely those boundaries where more immediate concerns about equity--a safe home, a decent job, adequate nutrition, intact families, etc.--are similarly being unsatisfied? Maybe those searching for alternatives, alternatives that pull their own potential "capital" away from the public schools (Ms. Thomas, given her skill in writing, could surely be an effective advocate at PTA meetings), have simply decided to unselfishly "distribute their capital" along different and more immediately pressing lines, and to do so in ways that (not coincidentally) avoids the costs which the public schools can press in particular upon religious parents like herself.

I've got a paper coming out this summer in Theory and Research in Education; you can read an earlier version of it here. There I make the argument that the only long-term hope for the full public education ideal in the U.S. is to make it more "popular"--that is, more populist, less governed by elite and distant norms and more reflective of immediate and local pressures, including religious ones. I don't know if that argument can really map onto what I've discussed in this post particularly well, but as a conclusion, let me at least throw out this: the push for home schooling, parochial schooling, private schooling and all the rest, when it takes place is socio-economically stable environments, will probably not fundamentally undercut the larger enterprise of providing the good of public schooling equally to all; as Laura notes, in those cases there will probably always be sufficient resourceful and reliable parents around to get the job done. But in more desperate environments, where the human capital of a parent like Ms. Thomas would be very much appreciated, a school that does not listen to and strive to reflect all the concerns of parents in the neighborhood, including the religious ones, is going to make it ever more likely that these parents--which could be one of the few remaining resources for holding together the larger enterprise in such an environment--are going to turn away, and quite legitimately and unselfishly decide that through directly tending to their family in their own homes they can serve their neighbors as well as their own children much better than they could through the schools.

Ms. Thomas's conclusions about public schools are harsh: "One child might ignore you; the school system certainly will. A child can hear or not hear; the school system is a deaf, dumb, blind juggernaut that doesn’t generate its own values but imports them from the developers of curriculum and the schools of education. You can talk to the teacher, you can talk to the principal, you can talk to the board of education, but there’s no one person, anywhere, who will say to you, 'I am responsible for this mess.'" Maybe that was true where she was; it isn't, or at least I think (I hope) not (yet?) true where we are. Serving and loving a public good larger than oneself is still, I would like to believe, a possibility in many if not most school systems. But those systems need to find a way to hold on to their human capital, to be part of efforts to localize and hold together the human and socio-economic infrastructure which makes contributing to such a system seem like a reasonable option to a parent (one that has a choice about how to spend their time anyway--obviously this is a moot issue if you're talking about a single parent struggling through two jobs to put food on the table....which is part of the point, really) in the first place. Lose that battle, and parents will flee--or as Rod put it, they will "secede in place." And from the any perspective that emphasizes attending to the needs of others, whether Christian or otherwise, they'd still probably be both smart and unselfish in doing so.

Friday PSTSS: "Watching the Wheels"

Something more upbeat this week: John Lennon's single finest post-Beatles composition, from 1980's awesome (and tragic, and thus now somewhat haunted) Double Fantasy album. I adore this song, increasingly so as I close in on the age Lennon was at when he recorded it (he was 40; I'll turn 39 this year). And I especially adore the line "People asking questions / Lost in confusion / Well I tell them there's no problem / Only solutions"; some people, it seems to me, are just plain suspicious of solutions--particularly the "square," family-oriented ones which Lennon discovered in the years he spent away from the music scene--and that is half their problem (or more).

People say I'm crazy
Doing what I'm doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings
To save me from ruin
When I say that I'm o.k. they look at me kind of strange
Surely your not happy now, you no longer play the game

People say I'm lazy
Dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice
Designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I'm doing fine, watching shadows on the wall
Don't you miss the big time boy, you're no longer on the ball?

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round,
I just had to let it go

People asking questions
Lost in confusion
Well I tell them there's no problem
Only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I've lost my mind
I tell them there's no hurry, I'm just sitting here doing time

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round,
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go

Thoughts on Rorty

When Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur passed away, I managed to put down, in fairly short order, some thoughts about how their ideas and arguments had influenced my own thinking, either negatively or positively. Last week, when the news broke that Richard Rorty had died of pancreatic cancer, I wanted to do the same, but visiting in-laws and other responsibilities made it impossible for me to get any writing done until today. And really, that's just as well, because it gave me time to take in a fascinating argument in the blogosphere, one which began with my friend Damon Linker's piece on Rorty in The New Republic, and which was then responded to in different ways by Matt Yglesias (here and here and here and here, with Damon's replies included), John Holbo, Ross Douthat, Will Wilkinson, and Pithlord. Oh, and Patrick Deneen's assessment and Jacob T. Levy's memories of Rorty are very good reading too.

I don't know if I have anything to add to the main argument itself; I can't claim that I know Rorty's work well enough to decidedly embrace either the "Rorty's insistent antifoundationalism makes him accidentally illiberal" position which Damon introduces (and which John concurs with in part, and which in a slight way kind of parallels Patrick's claim that Rorty affirmed an odd sort of democratic faith), or the "Rorty's 'faith' in antifoundationalism did not interfere with his commitment to an indifferently pluralistic democratic space" position which Matt defends. To work that out, you'd have to get pretty deep into Rorty's writings, and there's no guarantee that any definite answer could be found. As many commenters (including some of the above) have noted, Rorty went through several stages in his career, from pragmatist to postmodernist to populist (all of those labels following his own rather idiosyncratic definitions, to be sure), and his movement over time from one to the other was hardly seamless. So it's quite possible that at different points his devotion to "truth without correspondence to reality" and "ethics without principles" (to borrow titles from a couple of essays of his) might have seemed a side concern of his, relevant to only his fellow philosophers, whereas at other times it might have seemed an essential part of getting at his social hopes.

One aspect of Rorty's thought that might be helpful in sorting much of this out is looking at what Rorty believed about history and modernity. Obviously Rorty thought and wrote a great deal about matters pertaining to historicism, because grasping the various issues which emerged from Nietzsche's and others' challenges to Enlightenment notions of historical truth was a central part of articulating his response to different forms of foundationalism. But he did not often treat "modernity" as such as a subject for philosophical reflection; as Damon observed in his original TNR piece, philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger tended to see in the historicist challenge to traditional philosophy (whether we blame that challenge on the Enlightenment itself or on Plato or on someone in between is an incidental concern) as signaling the "collapse of the intellectual and cultural foundations of Western civilization," but Rorty--as influenced as he was by these thinkers--by contrast "insisted that the Western philosophical tradition [would terminate] not in the advent of a radically new world but rather in a world precisely like our own." Modernity, then, is terminal and general and unavoidable, and thus not particular important in itself.

But that's not quite the whole story, I think. There is, throughout every essay of Rorty's which advances his broad thesis against philosophy as a quest for independent reasons and foundations, and in favor of a sort of "philosophy" which sought only usefulness and sentiment and fellow-feeling, a consistent presumption about the "romantic" needs of human beings. In Rorty's wonderful autobiographical essay, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" [Philosophy and Social Hope, pgs. 3-20], he discusses his own youthful "private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests" (in his case, looking for orchids), and it becomes clear if you read him closely that he does not at all believe that the power of such "optional, orchidaceous extras" over the human mind will ever fade away. Rather, what Rorty wants to see, and believes that we can see (though he never argues that we are destined to see), is the transference of such passions from the search for a "luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision" to--and here he quotes Milan Kundera--''the wisdom of the novel," meaning "the sense of finitude...the tolerance...which result[s] from realizing how very many synoptic visions there have been, and how little argument can do to help you choose between them."

Some people, upon reading Rorty, have declared this position (not unreasonably) to be relativist, and it's true that Rorty often wrote in a relativistic vein, suggesting that the fact that the United States is a moderately successful liberal democratic state as opposed to a Nazi one is really just a matter of luck. But his invocation of the "wisdom of the novel," I think, leads us into the matter of the production of ideas, and their evolution. The wisdom of the novel, of course, depends upon the existence of, well, novels. So if we get novels, and we get people reading novels, then their passionate hopes for understanding and utopia can find another locus besides that which problematic and always potentially dangerous comprehensive visions (Christianity, Marxism, etc.) provide us with; their private passions can be made perfectly social and democratic. And this, I think, is what Rorty assumes without argument to be the real story of modernity: the gradual, always-tentative-and-only-if-we're-lucky, spread of novels and of the habits and hopes of a novel-reading public. Get that, Rorty appears to have believed, and there's little reason to doubt that anyone--except, perhaps, those occasional religious kooks, racists, and sociopaths out there--would resist following such a moderate, appealing path. As he once explained:

In past ages of the world, things were so bad that "a reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat" was hard to get except by looking to a power not ourselves. In those days, there was little choice but to sacrifice the intellect in order to grasp hold of the premises of practical syllogisms--premises concerning the after-death consequences of baptism, pilgrimage or participation in holy wars. To be imaginative and to be religious, in those dark times, came to almost the same thing--for this world was too wretched....But things are different now, because of human beings' gradual success in making their lives, and their world, less wretched. Nonreligious forms of romance have flourished--if only in those lucky parts of the world where wealth, leisure, literacy and democracy have worked together to prolong our lives and fill our libraries. Now the things of this world are, for some lucky people, so welcome that they do not have to look beyond nature to the supernatural, and beyond life to an afterlife, but only beyond the human past to the human future. ["Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance," Philosophy and Social Hope, pg. 162]

You can see, if you squint, the good old-fashioned secularization thesis lurking behind Rorty's words here. Make the world less wretched, and peoples' passions and imaginations can find the time and resources and space to go outside the demanding channels offered by comprehensive, sacrificing visions. They will, instead, fill libraries with variously worked-out, less-than comprehensive visions. Lucky people--the people who live in those less wretched societies--will read those books, be struck by the variety included therein, realize that their addiction to a single synoptic extra-ordinary explanation doesn't hold water, and will get along with something more humane in response. This I think is at least part of the reason why Rorty could engage in what John called his "rhetoric of anticipatory retrospective," and do so in such a way that, as John astutely notes, it arguably comes off (perhaps intentionally, perhaps accidentally, perhaps sometimes both) as somewhat exclusive and therefore in some sense "illiberal," if not authoritarian. He simply couldn't take seriously the idea that--again, outside of those few, inevitable and non-convertable sticks-in-the-mud, "the religious fundamentalist, the smirking rapist, or the swaggering skinhead," as he described them in"Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality"--there could be novel-reading moderns (one of the "lucky people" like himself) that wouldn't instinctively recognize the correctness of this shift in human thinking. And moreover, this is what led him to constantly fall back on fairly straightforward, ameliorative, Hubert Humphrey-type democratic (and Democratic) politics: the only real hope we moderns have got is to keep incomes rising, persuade capitalists to share a little more and not be quite so nasty, and therefore look anxiously but hopefully towards each day in which a few more people start reading novels and figure out that this is a pretty complicated world, with no one having a true grasp of the reality of it, and so therefore that it'd be best to keep one's passions centered on something private, like orchids.

This may be putting too much emphasis on something which Rorty himself did not dwell upon at length, but it does seem a reasonable explanation for why such a profoundly intelligent man would insist upon presenting his arguments in ways which annoyed so many of even those who agreed with him. He looked at the modern world, the novelized-and-therefore-pluralistically-transformed state of modernity, and couldn't countenance the possibility that synoptic visions of a comprehensive sort of could in any serious sense survive. This is why I tend to think Rorty's single most challenging interlocutor was the philosopher Charles Taylor. Like Rorty, Taylor believes--to be simple about it; unlike Rorty, Taylor has reflected upon modernity as a subject a great deal--that novel-reading has changed just about everything: Enlightenment or Platonic (again, take your pick) moral realism is not an option. But he insists that we still can--indeed, that we cannot avoid--being ontological in our thinking about the world, and thus consequently what we need to do is get clear on (so we can make better use of) how we are both being called to and how we draw out the moral sources already there in our art; in other words, how it is that our own supposedly private meaning-constructive acts are actually "strong evaluations" that partake of a "transaction between the world and ourselves...which the world initiates"--meaning that there is something synoptic out there which shines through. (Yes, that's Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutics-as-metaphysics, right there.) Rorty, in several wonderful exchanges with Taylor, took profound but respectful issue with this, arguing instead--and this fits entirely with the passage quoted above--that "one of the most important changes for the better in recent centuries is our increasing willingness to see our poets as edifying examples of how to mere human self-fashioners, rather than as people who open us up to something other than themselves, and perhaps something other than human" ["Taylor on truth," Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, pg. 20].

In Taylor, Rorty encountered a thoroughly modern (in a fully philosophical sense), yet thoroughly serious religious believer. To his credit, I think that drew out from Rorty some of his best work...which would suggest that his often annoying, potentially counterproductive, even arguably occasionally illiberal, presumptions about how the social and political blessings of modern world are made and/or are going to be made further available were, perhaps, partly a function of him being so rarely challenged on on these grounds. Perhaps a Rorty that had been less bothered by those who wanted to argue with him about the nature of language and things and truth, and had instead been more frequently confronted by philosophers who didn't read novels the same way he did, would have been a Rorty whose social hopes would have ended being articulated with much more hope than the intuitively brilliant but sometimes blasé actual Rorty could muster.

Friday PSTSS: "Millworker"

This Friday, another song about working and alienation, though this one is much more in the tradition of old-style country and folk ballads than the selection of Rundgren's last week. It comes off of my favorite James Taylor album, 1979's Flag, though the song itself was originally written by Taylor for the musical Working. I bought this album sometime around 1991 or 1992, when--between the Gulf War, my friendship with a man who became a Marxist mentor of sorts, and some personal crises of my own--my political and philosophical sympathies were in serious flux. I can remember the line "And never meet the man / Whose name is on the label" struck me with great force...and it still does, today.

Now my grandfather was a sailor
He blew in off the water
My father was a farmer
And I, his only daughter
Took up with a no good millworking man
From Massachusetts
Who dies from too much whiskey
And leaves me these three faces to feed

Millwork ain't easy
Millwork ain't hard
Millwork it ain't nothing
But an awful boring job
I'm waiting on a daydream
To take me through the morning
And put me in my coffee break
Where I can have a sandwich
And remember

Then it's me and my machine
For the rest of the morning
And the rest of the afternoon
And the rest of my life

Now my mind begins to wander
To the days back on the farm
I can see my father smiling at me
Swinging on his arm
I can hear my granddad's stories
Of the storms out on Lake Eerie
Where vessels and cargoes and fortunes
And sailors' lives were lost

Yeah but it's my life has been wasted
And I have been the fool
To let this manufacturer
Use my body for a tool
I'll ride home in the evening
Staring at my hands
Swearing by my sorrow that a young girl
Ought to stand a better chance

So may I work the mills
Just as long as I am able
And never meet the man
Whose name is on the label

Still it's me and my machine
For the rest of the morning
And the rest of the afternoon
For the rest of my life

Collective Efficacy, Neighborhood Authority

There was an excellent article by Eyal Press which appeared in The American Prospect few weeks back; titled "Can Block Clubs Block Despair?", it didn't get nearly the amount of attention in the blogosphere--from what I can tell anyway--that it deserved. Maybe that's because most peoples eyes glaze over when confronted with discussions of poverty that don't involve accusations that can be turned into handy soundbites, or maybe--focusing here on those who really do take the practical issues of poverty and equality seriously--those who scanned the article didn't see anything in it different from dozens of other pieces which focus on the role of "social capital," "civil society," and other Putnamesque concepts in rebuilding and maintaining intact neighborhoods. If the latter was the case, then that's unfortunate, because what Press's article examined was some urban research on the way in which something very simple--local community organizing--can contribute to the sense of "collective efficacy" in a neighborhood, and how such a sense of efficacy is one of the first as well as one of the most important steps in getting social capital built up again. Press talks about some survey research which took place in Chicago in the mid-1990s, which became the basis of an influence article in the journal Science:

One of the elements the surveyors were measuring was the level of "social cohesion and trust" in a community. To gauge this, surveyors asked residents to rank, on a five-point scale, how strongly they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements: "People around here are willing to help their neighbors"; "This is a close-knit neighborhood"; "People in this neighborhood can be trusted." A second set of questions sought to measure "informal social control" -- the capacity of adults in a community to work together to achieve a sense of public order. Here, individuals were asked how likely they thought their neighbors were to intervene in various situations: when a fight broke out; when someone was spray-painting graffiti; when the local fire station was threatened with budget cuts. Researchers supplemented the interviews by crisscrossing the city in vans fitted with video cameras to conduct systematic social observation of street life in various neighborhoods.

The results of the survey were striking. Throughout Chicago, the levels of violence and social disorder were markedly lower in communities where the sense of social cohesion and shared expectations about the willingness to intervene were higher -- qualities that, taken together, constituted something the designers of the experiment called "collective efficacy."

It was the second set of questions that particularly interest me, and which are most revealing in terms of efficacy. It is one thing for a resident of a neighborhood to say--perhaps without much or only anecdotal evidence, perhaps without having contributed anything directly themselves--that they feel they live in a friendly and helpful place; it is another thing entirely to ask people to speak of instances of actual--and therefore, in some important sense, anticipated and expected--intervention and participation: reporting a crime, filling a pothole, showing up at a PTA or city council meeting. That sort of thing goes much more directly to the idea of collective agency, the belief that a neighborhood possesses, as a group, a certain awareness of and faith in their ability to respond to disparate problems. Press goes on to report:

Over tea one day, Felton Earls, a professor of social medicine at Harvard who co-authored the original Science article, told me that collective efficacy... [is] a theory that emphasizes the capacity of residents to overcome obstacles on the basis of shared expectations--specifically, that they can work together for the common good. A small African American man with dark, pensive eyes and a neatly trimmed gray beard, Earls grew up in New Orleans, in a black community that was far from affluent. "But we didn't think of it as poor," he told me. There were "no gangs, no drugs," he said, "There were many indications of high collective efficacy, and by that I mean supervision of kids. There was music. There was church."

Collective-efficacy researchers like Earls don't claim that structural factors like racism and poverty are unimportant. What they do contend is that even people facing severe disadvantages have the capacity to organize themselves in ways that can make a tangible difference, both at the neighborhood level and on individual blocks.

Earls's comments struck me, because they sounded so much like the comments made by Dr. Galyn Vesey, who spoke at the same community organizing workshop where I presented my lecture on republicanism and radicalism in Kansas. He talked about his own experiences as a participant in civil rights protests and sit-ins in Wichita (yes, here in Wichita, KS; not all the civil rights agitation was in the South), yet he kept using the way he was brought to the point of participating in those difficult and dangerous enterprises to comment on what in his view the youth of today--particularly far too many African-American youth--lack. Dr. Vesey reminisced about the strong sense of trust they as teen-agers had developed for one another through their growing-up years in the all-black neighborhoods in northeastern Wichita and at East High School; he talked about how they had met under the direction of local NAACP leaders at various churches to practice and receive training, and how seriously they and their parents took the enterprise; and he said that he was grateful for the large amount of respect they all felt for parents, teachers, pastors and others who had prepared them, since in his view if that respect had not been there--if they'd instead been of a mind to rebel in an undisciplined way, to let their anger and pride lead them rather than a sense of unity and collective commitment--then their sit-ins would have failed or ended in violence or both. In short, he talked about what went into creating a powerful sense of efficacy--of the ability to make a difference, to improve one's lot in life, to work positively together--amongst his cohort of young black men and women fifty years ago, and a crucial part of that creation was just what Earls said: parental supervision, acceptance of responsibility, forums where people could see and learn from one another, and thus trust that they could work together. Because Vesey grew up on a set of city blocks of where family and school and religious authority was real, kids didn't (or couldn't, at least not easily!) escape learning how to be part of a collective, and that learning made it possible for them to challenge, when the right moment came, a white social structure which completely dwarfed them in terms of real power.

As Press admits, talking about the need for people to learn--whether through block clubs and community-improvement organizations (which are his primary examples) or through other forums for social bonding--how to have trust and, by the same token, learn to act in trustworthy ways (taking responsibility for one's family, teaching one's children, committing to improving one's home, all of which suggests the need for job and marriage stability and discipline) can easily begin to sound like a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps mentality, if not outright welfare-bashing. But rather than just back away from the argument in order to protect certain liberal sacred cows, Press suggests these kind of "conservative" or local culture responses can and should go hand-in-hand with progressive solutions:

Focusing on the social dynamics within neighborhoods [does risk] obscuring the larger structural inequities poor communities face. On the other hand, as even many progressive scholars who study urban poverty will admit, while structural inequality surely matters, it doesn't explain everything. Insisting otherwise can have the perverse effect of robbing poor people of agency--and of obscuring important differences among neighborhoods that racial and economic factors can't explain. Collective efficacy offers scholars and policy-makers a way to talk about such differences without playing into the reductive "culture of poverty" cliché or necessarily discounting the significance of other variables. In fact, the 1997 article in Science acknowledged that neighborhood activities can accomplish only so much. "Collective efficacy does not exist in a vacuum," it stated, but "is embedded in structural contexts and a wider political economy."

This, again, reminds me of Dr. Vesey's presentation; he was able to move seamlessly from a condemnation of what he sees as the lack of respect (both self-respect and otherwise) amongst young people today to a discussion of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, with its condemnation of a liberal movement that abandoned real, practical concerns about the availability of jobs and good wages and solid educations in favor of boutique cosmopolitan issues that only interest a highly educated elite, and thus allowed America's blue-collar and rural socio-economic worlds whither away and their remaining residents become ready targets for Republican hucksters. Plainly, it was obvious to him--and, I think, if one read Press's article correctly, it should be obvious to all of us--that one can and should see that a demand that local, state, and national governments be empowered and pressured so as to attend to preserving urban environments of productive employment as much as possible in the face of globalization, demographic change, suburbanization and so forth, is in no way counter to the equally insistent demand that cultural pathologies which undermine the effectiveness of parents, teachers, pastors and other members of a neighborhood be fought. And that means taking a stand for, and organizing on behalf of, the authority of a neighborhood to set standards and thus begin to draw fearful and untrusting residents out together into a collective project.

Press talks about driving through neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago with Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard who helped design the original Chicago experiment:

Sampson and I made our way to Englewood, an impoverished neighborhood where little has improved of late. Along the main drag, Ashland Avenue, the only businesses seemed to be funeral homes and the occasional storefront church. We pulled up to a stoplight, and a man in tattered jeans, a torn T-shirt, and oversized sneakers appeared, lurking ominously on the edge of the road. He stared vacantly into the distance, then hopped the curb and started zigzagging erratically through traffic. Mercifully, when the light changed, the man bolted away from the onrushing cars, sprinting at full speed back over the curb until he tripped and sprawled out on the sidewalk.

Sampson let out a sigh. "This community rates very high on our cynicism and desperation measures," he said. "The idea that people don't care about each other, that you've got to watch out for yourself, is very widespread"...

We were about to head off to another area when Sampson suddenly made an abrupt right turn, then another, then a third. "Hold on," he said. "Did you see that?" I hadn't, but what Sampson had spotted, at the entrance to one of the streets, was a sign for a block club: "No Loitering, Gambling, Drugs, Gangs." A few blocks over, young men had been hanging out on the crumbling stoop of a boarded-up building. Not on this block, though, which alone among the streets in Englewood we'd seen did not have a single abandoned unit on it. "It's like this little island," said Sampson, "and I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts there's less crime on this block than the ones surrounding it."

There will never be, of course, a single-bullet solution to urban poverty and inequality; Press certainly doesn't intend for us to believe that block clubs and community organizations is such. But his article does, I think, suggest important ways to reconsider the old social capital question: specifically, that by looking at the differences between communities in terms of what they offer by way of opportunities for expressing collective efficacy, for meeting together and making decisions and plans together and then holding each other responsible--as parents, homeowners, fellow parishioners or PTA members or just plain neighbors--to seeing those decisions and plans made good, we can get a better sense of what kind of investments and social policies are likely to make a difference in the safety and wealth of communities, and where such resources can be best spent. Though he doesn't touch on it, what Press's article really does is show how the research of Sampson and Earls and others in profoundly localizes all the talk in social science circles about civic virtue and trust. Such concepts are not just relevant solely in generational terms, talking about how the amount of solidarity and equality and wealth which this nation managed to achieve was due to the sacrifices and discipline of our parents and grandparents, but they also describe in a very specific way what happens, or can happen, when a neighborhood is given or makes for itself a venue and a cause and a strategy for being together and working together and believeing together towards the accomplishment of public goods. Which, in a way, makes Putnam's cultural theorizing surprising relevant to the question of poverty after all.

Friday PSTSS: "Honest Work"

I hereby inaugurate a new regular Friday feature: Pop Songs That Say Something. Why? Well, for two reasons. First, as I've confessed before, I'm actually a pretty dull, MOR-type when it comes to popular music--but at the same time, I'm quite willing to defend the pop song as potential vehicle for great craft; that within that "profoundly synthetic, repeatable, contained" four-minute song, you can find art. And with art comes meaning, and in this case specifically lyrical meaning: as pretentious or overwrought as some pop lyrics are, you can sometimes find, conjoined with the melody that carries, a message of surprising insight and poetry. Or at least so I tell myself, since I've tended to privately remember and quote to myself various pop song lyrics endlessly over the years. And since I have them in my head, why not put them up on the blog? What's what I do with everything else.

(Of course, the second reason is that every other blog has some sort of weekly feature; why shouldn't mine?)

"Honest Work" comes off of Todd Rundgren's 1985 album A Cappella; I've never been a major Rundgren fan, but I was turned onto him and this recording in particular by a college friend named Bob Ahlander, who founded a fairly successful a cappella group of his own at BYU back when we were both there in the early 90s. They never recorded "Honest Work," but they did sing it at some of their very earliest performances, and I treasure an old demo tape I have of their group, which includes this song. If you've never heard it, track it down and give it a listen; it is the most understated song on the album, and it captures the rough, inward, self-defeated despair that our meritocratic world has generated in the hearts of workers as well as any song I know. (I always think of the feverish capitalist dreams of certain techno-libertarians when he gets to the line "They see a world where everyone / Is rich and smart and young.") Enjoy.

I'm not afraid to bend my back
I'm not afraid of dirt
But how I fear the things I do
For lack of honest work

My family is lost to me
They could not bear the hurt
To see the state their boy is in
For lack of honest work

I hold no blame for anyone
'Twas I who did arrange
To pay my union dues so I'd
Not have to learn or change

And when I was replaced, 'twas I
Who started down the hill
And drank away my savings 'til
I couldn't stop myself

The prophets of a brave new world
Captains of industry
Have visions grand and great designs
But none have room for me

They see a world where everyone
Is rich and smart and young
But if I live to see such things
Too late for me they come

I know I'm not the only one
To fall beneath the wheel
Such company can not assuage
The loneliness I feel

So many are resigned to be
Society's debris
But I will be remembered for
The life life took from me

For I'm not afraid to bend my back
I'm not afraid of dirt
But how I fear the things I do
For lack of honest work

Radicalism and Republicanism in Kansas

My apologies for yet another long delay in blogging. April was busy--too busy--and May was hardly less so; it seemed that just as the semester ended and I got a break from all these new committee responsibilities I'm adjusting to, that a bunch of new stuff was thrown at me, via home and church. I really need to organize my time better. But then, I've been saying that for years, haven't I? Oh well; on with the summer. We're not going to be traveling until August this time around, so hopefully (there's always a "hopefully," right?) there won't be the sort of interruption in my blogging as has been common in summers past. But we'll see.

As usual, I start back up with a long post. About a month ago Sunflower Community Action, a citizens and neighborhood organizing group here in Wichita, asked me if I'd be interested in contributing to a workshop on Kansas culture and politics by lecturing a bit on Kansas's radical past. I was happy for the chance to put all that I'd been teaching and blogging and talking about for the past several months into lecture form, and I'm including the result below, pretty much in its entirety. Hopefully some of you will find it interesting, as well as relevant to the ongoing arguments about populism on the prairie--and elsewhere--today.


Radical and Republican Legacies in Kansas Politics

John Steuart Curry was a talented artist, born in Kansas in 1897 but educated in New York City and Paris, who was caught up by--but who also benefited from and strategically promoted--the rush of interest in "Regionalism" in the 1930s. Curry had perhaps the most ambiguous relationship with his home state of any of the "Regionalist Triumvirate": while Thomas Benton Hart and Grant Wood were pretty thoroughly and solidly products of and committed to Missouri and Iowa, respectively, Curry came back to Kansas only reluctantly, and his defining work of art involving Kansas--the mural "Tragic Prelude," painted on the east corridor of the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka--was by no means embraced by the Kansas public or its politicians. "Prelude," with its towering figure of John Brown, armed with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, bestriding a scene of violence, danger, and conflict, was reproduced in Life in 1939; it was a sensation, but also the last straw for some who disliked Curry's emphasis on Kansas's bloody and radical beginnings. Refusing to support Curry's request that some marble slabs be moved to accommodate his work on the uncompleted murals, Kansas lawmakers essentially shut down his larger vision for the Capitol; Curry then left his existing paintings unfinished and unsigned. He died in 1946, but the figure of John Brown--a wild-eyed Colossus--remains.

In some ways it is fitting that John Brown is still there, unfinished, looking down on Kansas lawmakers, because John Brown's legacy for Kansas is similarly unfinished and unclear. Brown is hardly a central, or even a particularly important, figure in the historical record of the state--yet his legacy is an enormously important factor in Kansas having become both at one time the most radical, but also for much of its history the most Republican, state in the union.

The history of Kansas of concern here is the one which began with the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The pressure was building for Congress to open up the remaining unorganized land from the Louisiana Purchase for settlement, but southern politicians did not want to open up any new land to potential statehood that would fall under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, which forbade slavery north of the 36th parallel. This was a difficult position for Democrats like Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who wanted to maintain the support of those who wished to open up and move into the western territories, but couldn't afford to antagonize voters and powerbrokers in the South. The solution, of course, was the gutting of the Missouri Compromise and the establishment of "popular sovereignty"--or "squatter sovereignty" as some preferred to call it--as the principle under which the territories of Kansas and Nebraska would decide if they would become slave or free states. This move, perhaps more than any other development in the 1850s, radicalized abolitionist opposition to slavery and forced moderate Democrats to choose sides, with Douglas himself becoming a general champion of the state-sovereignty approach to slavery and the South beginning its long-lasting role as crucial to Democratic electoral plans. (In 1852, the Democrats had won all but two of the northern states; in Congressional elections two years later though, they lost all but two, thus setting the stage for the subsequent identification of the Democrats with the South, agitation and rebellion.)

In May of 1854 there were fewer than 800 permanent white settlers living in the Kansas territory--indeed, besides those stationed at Ft. Leavenworth, those traveling the Santa Fe Trail to California, and various Methodist and Quaker missionaries, the population of Kansas was then almost wholly indigenous. But within nine months the number residents of European descent had increased by a factor of ten. Pro- and anti-slavery forces pored into Kansas, determined to put down roots and shape a state government either supportive of or opposed to slavery. For Missourians, the "Border Ruffians" and "Self-Defensives" who would cross over into Kansas, stake claims or briefly vote or harass other settlers, and then retreat back across the state line, it was a matter of protecting their "rights" as slave owners and their economic position: as mostly small farmers with few slaves, without the power of the plantation system that existed in the Deep South to back them up (and thus maintain social control), the existence of a free state next door was profoundly threatening. And they quickly, and rightly, deduced that this would not be any "ordinary" free state; the possibility of winning an electoral battle against the "Slave Power" on the ground was enormously appealing to many New England abolitionists, and the battle for Kansas became a huge fundraising and recruitment opportunity. Organizations like the New England Emigrant Aid Company helped move--and arm with rifles and other equipment--hundreds of settlers, setting the stage for numerous early conflicts that only escalated as time went by. Most early Kansas communities became quickly identified as havens for either pro- or anti-slavery settlers--Atchison being one of the former, Lawrence one of the latter--allowing for literal political lines to be drawn almost from the start.

It must be noted, however, that as the decade progressed the lure of land was at least as important as the struggle over slavery; fully a third of Kansas's white residents by 1860 had come from the Midwest, not New England or Missouri (or points further south). This is not to say that they had no interest in the partisan battles over slavery, only that their interest in it was not a direct moral or economic one. This was the decade when the Republican party emerged as a national alternative to the Whigs, and the Republican slogan of "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" must be understood for what it truly was. The Republican opposition to the expansion of slavery was not grounded in a deeply abolitionist sentiment, though many Republican leaders did hate slavery; mostly, their opposition was grounded in the belief that slavery was a corrupting social system, which placed too much power in the hands of non-working slave owners and plantation masters, thus undermining the freedom of the white wage-earner or proprietor--an independent man with dignity and a family to support (such patriotic and patriarchal rhetoric was important)--to expand his property, advance economically, and control his own destiny politically. For early Kansas politicians like James Lane, opposition to slavery had nothing to do with sympathy for slaves and African-Americans; on the contrary, part of the reason why Lane opposed slavery in Kansas was because he wanted to keep Kansas entirely white. Such racial animosity clearly did not typify the Republican party as a whole, of course, but it captures a major part of the thinking of early Kansas settlers. The problem was not, for the most part, the degradations and discrimination suffered by people of African descent in a society which tolerated slavery; rather, it was the inequality and indecency embodied by a system which denied the fruits of liberty to ordinary independent freeholders (who theoretically could have been of any race, but who in the rhetoric and thought of most of America's voters were clearly white).

But then came John Brown--and not just Brown, but the revolution in partisan thinking about slavery he represented. Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800, and was a zealous Christian, deeply influenced by the language and power of the Old Testament and committed to the abolitionist cause. Unlike many abolitionists, however, he was also personally devoted to the cause of racial equality. He firmly denounced those who opposed slavery yet promoted racial separationism, and once was expelled from a church in Ohio for inviting an African-American family to attend with and sit in the pew beside his own. A wanderer without roots or much economic success in life, it was perhaps inevitable that he would be drawn to the struggle in "Bleeding Kansas." One of his sons came first, settling in Franklin County in early 1855, and was immediately caught up in the formation of antislavery militias, designed to defend free-state settlements and protect their representatives in the territorial government. (This protection was much needed; in the chaotic early months of Kansas's settlement, the rule of law was minimal at best, and fraud, intimidation, and mob action was common.) In a letter, Brown's son complained that the free-state settlers were sorely lacking in any kind of military organization, and this inspired Brown himself to relocate--leaving behind his wife, a new baby, and a host of debts and lawsuits--in the fall of that year. Within weeks, the Browns were in the thick of the conflict. In December of 1855, John Brown joined others in turning Lawrence into an armed camp, in preparation for an expected attack upon the free-state legislators living in the town by a group of intoxicated Missourians gathered along the banks of the Wakarusa River--the so-called "Wakarusa War." In this case, Marx's dictum was reversed, as the farce preceded the tragedy: while in December the territorial governor has been able to broker a deal to get the aimless yet angry mob to disperse, six months later Lawrence truly was attacked--by an organized force with artillery, no less--and the residents and legislators living there fled for their lives.

John Brown was infuriated that he had been too late to fight in the "Siege of Lawrence," and dismissed Republican free-state leaders like Charles Robinson as a "perfect old woman" who was "more talk than cider." Brown's cider, by contrast, was fiery and pure. On May 24, Brown led for of his sons and three other men on a mission to the nearby proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie, where they dragged five men--none of whom owned slaves or had participated in the attack on Lawrence--from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords. In later years, Brown would be coy about whether or not he had directly killed any man that night; in an early formulation of terrorist language which has become unfortunately familiar to us all, Brown rather insisted that he had done God's work that night, and that the deaths of those men--however it happened--did not displease him, the servant of the Almighty, in the least.

Brown stayed in Kansas only a little while longer; he was a wanted man, a guerrilla fighter, whose reputation--for violence and visionary leadership--increased with every week and month and year he was able to elude capture and outfight those sent after him. He and his loyal troops participated in what some historians consider to be the first organized military encounter of the Civil War in June of 1856. He fled the territory after troops were sent to destroy the free-state settlement of Osawatomie where he had been hiding, returned a couple of times after freeing slaves in Missouri and leading them through Kansas on their way north, but by 1859 was gone for good. His path took him, as everyone knows, to Harper's Ferry and death by hanging. But in Kansas, his legacy remained. Most importantly, the way he was celebrated and condemned throughout the nation for his implacable hatred of slavery and commitment to racial justice and the overthrowing of "Slave Power" was seared into the self-understanding of Kansans. As the years went by and the Civil War was fought, the battle between the north and south seemed in Kansas almost a continuation of the vicious, personal, neighbor-against-neighbor conflict that its residents had seen and had contributed to throughout the 1850s. (Which in many cases it actually was; the fighting between Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War years was particularly localized and bloody.) With the success of the free-state forces in Kansas, and then the success of the Union forces across the country, Kansans had reason to believe that they been more deeply committed to the struggle over slavery than any other state, and that belief had real political consequences.

For one thing, it made the Republican party absolutely dominant in the state. So many Union veterans settled in Kansas that it came for a time to be known as the "Soldier State," and these veterans almost to a man voted as they had shot--that is, they voted for the party of Lincoln, and against the traitorous Democrats. Waving the "bloody shirt," accusing the Democratic party of being in sympathy to slavery and treason, was commonplace throughout America in the 1870s and 1880s, but nowhere more than in Kansas. In the first fifty years of Kansas's statehood, there was only one Democratic governor, and that aberration was corrected after a single term in office. Moreover, the memory of the Bleeding Kansas era, and the impact of John Brown's revolutionary commitments, had made Kansas Republicans somewhat radical; in their proposed state constitutions in 1858 and 1859, they not only outlawed slavery (which made it into the final version), but also advanced a measure to protect the rights and votes of blacks and women (which did not, but not for lack of trying). Following the war, Kansas Republicans moved even more rapidly than those Radical Republicans in Congress did in their fervor to punish the South and fulfill what they took to be President Lincoln's dream; the state of Kansas held a referendum of providing African-Americans with the vote in 1867, before the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was even ratified.

But not only did Kansas Republicans' radicalism move more quickly than the national version did, it lasted longer. The energy and influence of the Radical Republicans in Washington DC was soon spent; by the late 1870s Reconstruction in the South came to an end, and the white power structure of the former Confederacy immediately began to re-assert itself, overwhelmingly through the Democratic party. With the "Solid South" completely lost to them, the Republican party needed to shore up its own majorities, and it increasingly found these in the rising corporate, trading, and banking interests of the cities of northeastern and upper midwestern states. In time the national Republican party, and state Republican party establishments throughout the country, shed much of the aspiration hopes of Lincoln, to say nothing of the crusading demands of Brown; the Republican party as the party of entrepreneurs and businessmen and the upper-class was born. Obviously, there were Republicans who were unhappy with this; hence the Mugwumps, who spurned the Republican party of the 1880s and embraced Grover Cleveland, a Democrat for president. Kansas Republicans were even more divided, as the apparent corruption and increasing complacency of what was once an intense and even revolutionary movement in American politics seemed a rebuke to all that they had identified themselves as over the previous 30 years. There were numerous split-off groups amongst the Kansas Republicans, with variously titled Liberal Republicans of Independent Republicans contesting items in the party's official platform throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The arrival of large numbers of African-Americans kept this struggle, the struggle to keep the Republican party faithful to the principles of conflict from which it had emerged, very much in the minds of Kansans. The "Exodusters," lured to Kansas by the promise of cheap land and the hope of settling in that state where the blessed John Brown had begun his war for equality, confronted and tested the good intentions of Kansas Republicans; the state's black population went from under 1000 in 1860, to over 15,000 in 1870, to three times that in 1880, and at least a dozen all-black communities were established throughout the state. As the years went by, as conditions for farmers worsened in the age of centralized monopolies and tight credit, as Jim Crow laws and a racial backlash in the form of the Ku Klux Klan strengthened their grip through the country, the Kansas Republican leadership had more cause and more opportunity to lead than was the case perhaps anywhere else in the nation.

Kansas Republicans did not wholly fail the test--but the did not wholly pass it either. In terms of racial politics, there were notable successes: for example, the Republican legislature for several years acquiesced to the request from the NAACP to ban the hideously racist film Birth of a Nation in Kansas, all while the movie was a sensation elsewhere. But in time, the radical element of Kansas Republicanism was superseded by something else: the appropriation by the Republican party of the new moderate, small-town, "middle-class" voice of America, so expertly embodied by William Allen White, a newspaper editor and eventual Republican mouthpiece for the nation from Emporia. By the turn of the century, the transformation of the U.S. from an mostly self-sufficient and localized, agrarian and rural society to a mostly specialized and national, industrial and urban society was nearly completion. The deep conceptual heart of the old call for "free soil, free labor, and free men" could have been source of resistance to the emergence of an interconnected and corporatized capitalist state, and a demand for real economic democracy, but instead it was adapted--as Lincoln himself had done some clever adapting of what America supposedly stood for in his Gettysburg Address--into a call for conserving small-town virtues and (white, Protestant) ways of life in the midst of a world where economic sovereignty and political power was being rapidly, and perhaps inevitably, concentrated in the hands of educated and cosmopolitan elites. Thus was the Kansas Republican party, like White himself, slowly transformed into a perfect vehicle for the "modern" and moderate--yet nostalgic and homey, always mindful of the bourgeois ways of the small prairie town--policies of the Progressive Republicans. Racially, Kansas had what it considered to be a mild and reasonable amount of segregation (Republican lawmakers in the 1950s would complain about how a court case which began in Topeka led to Brown v. Board of Education, saying that it was unfair that Kansas's sort of segregation should be associated with the presumably much different sort that existed in the Deep South); the need for more collective, affirmative actions to bring real social equality to blacks was something they never considered. Economically, the Kansas Republican party was flexible enough to respond to the Populist challenges of the 1890s and 1900s, returning from severe and surprising electoral defeats with proposals for change in the regulation of railroads and banks that got them returned to power in short order. (The fact that the Populists, through William Jennings Bryan, were from 1896 on closely associated with the Democrats made all the easier, of course, for Kansas Republicans to attack them as traitors in disguise.) White lambasted the Populists as wild-eyed fools and uneducated bumpkins, yet he fought the Klan with Brownesque fervor, and happily endorsed much of the Populist platform once it was moderated and modernized by Republicans like Robert LaFollette--to say nothing of Democrats like FDR. In these ways, White exemplifies the way John Brown's radical, egalitarian legacy long influenced the Republican party he helped make dominant in Kansas, but was also, in time, almost completely sublimated within it.

I say "almost completely sublimated," not entirely. For one doesn't have to look any further than to the innumerable analyses of "Red America" and rise of the "Christian Right" and so forth, all so well--if often profoundly inaccurately--realized by Thomas Frank in his bestselling screed What's the Matter with Kansas?, to realize that Kansas's almost unique mix of radical moralism and conservative populism is still present, lurking somewhere beneath the surface. Of course, the political surface itself has almost wholly changed; the issues which characterized the search for economic sovereignty and racial justice a century or more ago have been, in Kansas at least, almost definitively buried by the transforming effects of World War II and modern farming technology on the one hand, and numerous Supreme Court decisions and civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s on the other. And meanwhile, a host of moral and social issues--abortion most prominently--that never would have occurred to the free-staters and Exodusters and Populists of yore now define much of the political landscape.

So perhaps John Brown's legacy, the ideals and tensions which his radical, violent, visionary actions bequeathed to Kansas and the Republican party which embraced his memory (at first devotedly, in time reluctantly), is really and truly on its way out. Over the past decade, after all, the progressive and conservative factions of the Kansas Republican party have torn each other apart, so much so that Democrats nationally are looking at Kansas--and our rising star of a governor, Kathleen Sebelius--as a state of serious opportunity for them for the first time since...well, maybe for the first time ever. Craig Miner ends his wonderful history of the Sunflower State by claiming that Kansas has resisted homogenization as long and as successfully as any other state in the country (in no small part because its intense past became so entwined with its institutional memory), but that now becoming "like the nations" is unavoidable. Will ordinary, nonpopulist, nonprogressive, just straightforward Republican (and Democratic) politics therefore be our future?

For my part, I'll keep my eyes on that unfinished, unsigned mural of John Brown, watching with burning eyes the passing scene, and wait.

Ode to My--and Others'--Youth (also, Ralph Nader)

I told myself I wouldn't take such long breaks from blogging this year, and I meant it too. But here I am, three weeks away from the blog, and the usual number of half-finished posts piling up, perhaps never to see the sight of day. My main excuse, this time around at least, is the same as Tim Burke's--this April I've really been swamped, and a lot of it has been with stuff I've never seriously had to deal with before: advising, committee responsibilities, program evaluations, faculty searches, curriculum reforms, and all the rest of the business of being a full-time, tenure-track academic that eluded me while I had that "temporary" label attached to my title. I'm not complaining (well, not about most of it--though figuring out how to translate course outcomes for my education majors into all these matrixes and rubrics which the state certification boards have decided must be used is a real pain). Building up a major, shaping requirements, evaluating students: I like it all. But it does take up a lot of time. I know, I know, wah wah wah.

Aside from all this, I have managed to keep up an ongoing conversation over this past month with some other writers over matters discussed in this post of mine on William Jennings Bryan and populism, much of which has been informed by the reading I've done for my History of Kansas class, which in turn was shaped by a lot of fine recommendations I received last semester from you all. I have a couple of posts to finish regarding that conversation and issues which came up in that class, which wraps up next Tuesday; I'll try to get them up over the next couple of days. But for today, another end of the semester note, one that takes me back to my undergraduate years at Brigham Young University.

Some of you are no doubt aware that Vice President Dick Cheney will be speaking at my alma mater's graduation commencement ceremony tomorrow--not because I assume a great number of you care what happens at BYU, but because the fact that the invitation has actually given rise to protests at one of America's most politically conservative campuses, located in the heart of arguably America's most conservative county, has attracted all sorts of media coverage. To which I can only say: man, I'm jealous. See, I was a twentysomething BYU protester once: not a terribly responsible or ethical one, I can't deny (working for the university's official daily newspaper and simultaneously writing for and rabble-rousing along with its underground student-run weekly was hardly my finest moment, and my unceremonious firing from the former was pretty justified), nor an entirely unconflicted one (politics and religion are not easily separated at the ground level, especially at a church school like BYU, and so sometimes I got caught up by events and commitments that I couldn't in good conscience support), but one that got out and carried signs and collected signatures and was even arrested for civil disobedience in those fun years of 1991-1994 or thereabouts nonetheless. I've left that kind of political activism behind, for the most part, as most people do as they take on the responsibilities and complexities of adulthood and the professional world; nowadays, giving a speech at a local community organizing group is more my speed (in fact, I just gave one yesterday). I don't regret giving it up, but neither--except, admittedly, for a few really boneheaded moves on my part, such as the one mentioned above--do I regret my involvement in those causes, as much in vain as many of them were, and as much as some of my views have changed since then. (Some more reflections on my protest days here.) Direct, expressive, face-to-face political action--when it is done responsibly and respectfully, and not given over to self-righteousness and contempt--is a healthy thing, good for democratic society and good for the soul. Reading about the success that the BYU Democrats have had, and especially reading about the alternative commencement they and other malcontents have managed to organize, makes me feel happier--and older!--in regards to my undergraduate years than I have in quite a while.

Ah, yes...about that commencement. Ralph Nader, huh? Well, no, he wouldn't have been my first choice either. (Jimmy Carter, perhaps--but I doubt he's on the lecture circuit these days.) I have to admit that I think it's rather amazing (but in a good way!) that a plea for donations to Daily Kos would have been so successful, considering all the hate for Nader out there. No, I'm not going to attempt to refight the Nader wars; I said my bit and made my peace about supporting him for president in 1996 and 2000 long ago, and I've nothing to add now. Well, except for one thing.

I don't know, and doubt I'll ever know, Nader personally. Most of what is written and said about him and his interests and activities has always acknowledged streaks of arrogance and authoritarianism in his personality; for all I know, those streaks now complete dominate him, and perhaps those who say he's now just little more than an ambulance-chaser to boot are correct as well. I think he has been, more than once in his life, an important rallying point for those who seek to articulate a populist political response to the corporate and technocratic elites who dominate the democratic process and the marketplace; the fact that his response is not enough to make me wish to directly hand him executive power--especially given is lack of attention to building anything constructive in his wake--doesn't rob him of his ability to effectively harness the expressive desires of folks like myself who otherwise can't, as he put it, crash the party of what sometimes seems like an aristocracy that rules our country. Is harnessing such desires unwise when confronted by the real-world consequences--Cheney being one!--of pursuing such idealism (an idealism mixed with messianic complex, as the case may be)? In all likelihood, it often is. But I wouldn't want to live in a society without it, all the same.

And as for his speech and the alternative commencement tomorrow, well, I doubt anyone--probably including Nader himself--will think substantively about what it means for a bunch of protesters in the heart of Mormon Country to turn to the former Green Party candidate. If anyone thinks about it at all, they'll probably have their speculations short cut by observing that, in all likelihood, there weren't many others with that kind of name recognition available on that short of notice. But speculation should happen all the same--because the truth is, Nader's moral and social authoritarianism, if you want to call it that, is not a drag on his progressive commitments; on the contrary, they inform one another, and that sort of mutual informing, in which social solidarity combines with moral edicts and cultural presumptions, is the sort of thing which I think all Christian progressives, and Mormon ones in particular, really ought to be familiar with. To quote--with a few amendations and qualifications--an old post of mine defending the idea that leftism and an attendance to forms of cultural or even moral authority can go together:

What many progressives call "wingnuttery" is, I think at least in part, a concern for authority--including, most crucially, the authority of certain principles as embedded in cultural presumptions. You can't, in the minds of these and other leftists [like Nader], achieve progress solely through the legal establishment of a plurality of neutral spaces wherein one may (hopefully) achieve egalitarian improvement through the freedom of choice (though the prudential argument for the preservation of at least a little neutral space is strong). Such a focus is insufficient, as it never addresses who actually holds power over and in the midst of those spaces....What you need is an engagement with the whole culture, a popular demand for its conformity with justice as dictated by (you guessed it) absolutes, not merely the availability of free choice....This is part of the reason why Nader has never seen much importance in mobilizing people against traditional views on behalf of abortion rights or "gonadal politics." Is that "authoritarian"? Well, yes--insofar as one may speak of "working-class authoritarianism" as Christopher Lasch and others have. Or one could just call it "communitarian," in the sense of insisting that self-government rests primarily upon our attendance to communal values--which for many millions of working-class people [as Harry Brighouse and Bill Martin observed in the passages I quoted in this post] means a "culture of life"--and not simply the private space we afford citizens in the choosing of such.

The great majority of those who will attend the alternative commencement tomorrow will not be looking for working-class solidarity; they'll be going out of curiosity, out of a desire to be recognized as one of those who were less than satisfied with or indeed perhaps deeply opposed the university's decision to invite a man with Cheney's public record to speak at their graduation, maybe even out of desire to hear something important about what they did in response to Cheney's visit, and why more such direct action is the part of the way to create a healthier political culture, a culture in which the abuses of a vice president are not so easily kept from democratic exposure and accountability. I'm sure that at least they'll get the latter; whatever Nader's many faults, he clearly still knows how to sell youthful activists on a life of protest. Good of him, I say, and for them. And if maybe, just maybe, Nader or someone else says or does something to help all these twentysomething protesters like I once was see that their (and my) religious beliefs can be progressive, without unnecessarily compromising their acceptance of the culture and faith which made them....well, then they will have a truly great commencement. Certainly a much better one than Dick alone could have provided.

Harry Beyond?

Okay, so it's three and a half months or so until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released, everyone's counting down to the big day, pre-ordering their copies, grasping at every last bit of information...and now they've released the cover art for all the different editions of the book. They're out there for you to examine and argue about at great length (try here), and I can't pretend I haven't been. This old post of mine continues to get massive amounts of attention, so I figured a little update couldn't hurt.

(Incidentally, I have to wonder--has there every been a publishing phenomenon like Harry Potter before? Has the rise of the internet changed all the rules of how to build buzz...and what you can build buzz about? Are the Potter books sui generis, or will we--in a year or a decade or two--be treated to another ongoing story, published serially through several books, which blogs and the internet will enable similarly excited and ongoing discussions? I'm not talking about fanfic here; I'm talking about something that borders on a mass event, involving millions of people, all following the same rumors and watching the same dates. Sometimes the only thing it seems comparable to is the Star Wars phenomenon of my childhood, as the countdown to and arguments about The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi filled every playground and high school locker room. But those were movies...these are books. Maybe we have to all the way back to Dickens, and the enormous impact he had on the Victorian reading public, desperate to find out what happens to Little Nell.)

Unfortunately, I can't claim much that I feel comfortable in "updating" regarding those old predictions. Some of them I might want to refine now, as I've thought about things some more, but basically I stand by them, if only out of orneriness. I've said my piece about Snape and Harry and everyone else, so let the chips fall where they may. And as for covers and all the speculation surrounding them, two I can't come up with any kind of substantive take on at all with. The U.K. adult edition is a no-brainer: clearly that's the Slytherin locket, the real one, the one which R.A.B. stole, and which I believe Mundungus Fletcher unwittingly(?) lifted from Grimmauld Place, and sold/returned to Aberforth Dumbledore. As for the U.K. children's edition, I'm at a completely loss. Is that Dobby on Harry’s back? Why are Ron and Hermione wearing such fine robes (have they just come from Bill and Fleur's wedding)? I don’t even have a good sense of the direction of the action on the cover—are they falling, or moving forward, disappearing, appearing, or what? so that leaves the U.S edition...and even here, there's little I'm willing to wager.


Okay, what do we have here? Some people are immediately connecting the curtains with the drapes fluttering in the arch in the "Death Chamber" in the Department of Mysteries described in Order of the Phoenix. I don't think so; go back and look at the American cover for Sorcerer's Stone, and you'll find curtains there as well. There haven't been curtains on any other cover, thought. So this is the artist telling us that in Book One the story begins, and in Book Seven it ends.

But what is happening in that scene? Neither Harry nor Voldemort are wielding wands. Moreover, they don't even appear to be facing each other; both are either reaching out to/appealing to someone or something outside the picture, or else trying to ward that same person or thing away (this might explain Voldemort's hand positions, but not Harry's, suggesting that they are both having very different reactions to some development or actor off scene). Presumably, this is showing us the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort, or part of it. So...is that showdown not the duel/battle we all thought it would be? Perhaps not. There is something about this cover--the strange light in the sky, the ghostly figures around the edges of the amphitheater they are standing in, the broken wood or ruins at their feet--that makes me think that those who jumped to thinking it involves that arch, through which Sirius passed to his death, through which Harry and Luna alone could hear voices, are not wrong. I have predicted that the final battle is going to happen at Hogwarts, and I would really like to believe that what we’re seeing on the cover is the Quidditch field…but I doubt it. The size and shape are all wrong. No, I think we may very well be looking at what lays beyond that veiled arch, or else we are seeing what that same room in the Department of Mysteries appears to be to those who have gone through the veil. Harry, in short, has gone beyond this world, and perhaps stands--along with Voldemort--in a world somewhere between this one and the next one, a world of ghosts...of Sirius...of his mother and father, and maybe everyone else who have somehow not entirely disappeared from this story yet, whether through the power of Harry's own longing or through Voldemort's soul-splitting wand. And speaking of wands, their absence in the cover art makes sense under this explanation: wands would clearly be useless in a spirit world (or, dare I suggest, on "deathly hallowed ground").

Maybe I'm thinking about this stuff because I've recently run across, through the blogs Eating Words and Sword of Griffindor--the former a fine collection of thoughts, opinions, and reflections, and the latter a great resource for the Harry Potter-obsessed--a pretty darn comprehensive look at everything J.K. Rowling has gone on the record saying about her Christian faith (about which, the most succinct summary might be her own comment about attending church: "Well, I go more than to weddings and christenings"), and in that piece it is pointed out that on a several occasions Rowling has been reluctant to speculate too much about religion and the Harry Potter universe...not, she says, because she's worried about certain overzealous Catholics and evangelicals that want to ban her books (about which I've said my piece here), but because doing so would give things away. Here's a couple of crucial quotes from Rowling:

"Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books."

and:

"Magic in the sense in which it happens in my books, no, I don’t believe. I don’t believe in that....This [talking about religion] is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I've written book seven. But then maybe you won't need to even say it because you’ll have found it out anyway. You’ll have read it."

All this sets me to thinking...what if Rowling doesn’t want the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort to tell us much of anything about magic, but rather wants to tell us something about death, ghosts, our souls, and the afterlife? Most of my predictions presumed that Rowling's ultimate aim through the Harry Potter books--besides relating a great story--was to bring us to the point where we could see, through Harry's eyes, something about the relationship between persons in the real world. (You have constant subthemes throughout the books regarding racism, exclusion, separation, trust, and love.) But what if Rowling is actually stalking larger, more metaphysical, game? Or at least, what if she's designed a story that has to take us beyond this world in order to get to her point about those within it? (Shades of Tolkien, where the whole epic force of his story is characterized by its existence in a context haunted by an older, deeper, more "deathly" story.) Those figures on the cover--could they be the spirits of those slain by Voldemort? Are they watching the final battle as witnesses? As a court of appeal? Are they waiting desperately to see what happens next, or do they already know? Is there perhaps some reason why they haven’t been able to continue on to the next world, why a prior incantatem makes them potentially capable of being brought back? Might Harry himself also be part of the reason they’ve stayed on? This moves in the direction of thinking Harry himself or his scar is a Horcrux, a conclusions I still reject...and yet...

Oh well--I'll find out in fifteen weeks or so. For all I know, Voldemort has gone legit, and he and Harry are having a parliamentary debate in front of the Wizengamot. Rowling has pulled fast ones on us before; this one, her last, may be a doozy.