Washington, Connecticut. For such a brash and brass knuckle thing as the American Representative Democracy, its’ citizens, after over two hundred years of hard slog seem a little too prone now to the comforts of the herd. We used to be self-starting and skeptical. We used to root for the underdog, no matter his or her DNA. Even an arch-statist such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was known to erect homely temporary Federal facilities, confident that once the current emergency ended, they would be abandoned and dismantled so that the people could resume their primacy over the State. The so-called “Conservative’s” favorite punching bag , Bill Clinton even left us a surplus and the opportunity to downsize in light of an America that found itself unchallenged. This fundamental awareness of limits is obviously no longer the case.

Our current American Government has banished the idea of “temporary” to a remote reservation on a Trail of Tears it likes to call “Change” or, in a pinch, “Security”. This has been one of the trademark bi-partisan initiatives of the current era. Regardless of whether the majority is Democrat or Republican, Federal directive now dominates our politics. Most notably, as recently reported in the Washington Post, it is burrowing deeper into our collective conscious by granting Top Secret Security Clearance to 800,000 people, at least that we know of. This would be almost funny if we were talking about some other country. The fact that we now require nearly a million people to be daily engaged in the top secret realms of state security would have been a preposterous notion only 15 years ago. 25 years ago it would have been scoffed at as some kind of bizarre Soviet Excess of Evil Empire. As Gide suggested, freedom has scared us out of our wits, paralyzed us. We no longer know what to do with it.

Fear, like water would appear to be a universal solvent. It has readily dissolved the hopes and dreams of the average American and replaced them with a kind of nervously desperate, elegiac fatalism. If I had a nickel for each time I heard or read someone somberly utter the defeatists oath: “our children will not have the opportunities that we once had”, I could fund and luxuriously appoint a Foundation whose role it is to dole out comfy sinecures for all our children, well into the future. Unfortunately, “can-do” has been replaced by “can’t-do”. It is now almost a given that declining expectations are en vogue. Welcome to the consumer chic of decay.

The Land of Opportunity is in Foreclosure. Boo Hoo hoo.

Perhaps the bait and switch schizophrenia of American Exceptionalism has finally run its course. After all, we have for so long heard the phrase “American Democracy” that we have come to believe our stage-managed direct democracy exercise in voting is much more than a kind of bone thrown to a hungry dog, anxious to serve their master no matter how much dignity must be lost in the process. We have come to confuse the representative electoral process as some kind of popular democratic process when it has not been such for well over 25 years. This is primarily because we have allowed our political objectives to become dominated by top-down Federal Fiat rather than the bottoms-up, locally dominated Federalism originally crafted for us. American political campaigns for Federal Office are little more than stage-managed fantasies with high production values presenting a series of canned yet picturesque fables that would be fertile ground for satire if we still had our wits about us. A strong sense of irony and its humorous consorts must be some of the softer geologic strata of our eroded intellectual tectonics. How many times must we fall for the blandishments of political promises of “cleaning house” as the American House becomes more decrepit, debt-loaded and subsidized by the year? Really now, my leering muscles are tired. The humor of it is stale because irony is no longer irony; it is now the outcome of every action, removing all the fizz from its past frisson of lessons learned.

Having lost or more aptly put it, surrendered our native skepticism, we citizens of a dejected republic have elected to tribe up and accept our place within a stage-managed theater of herds. Each herd has its champions and the role of the herd is to keep the individual champions exalted by running down the opponent’s herd and in particular, the opposing herd’s standard bearer. This Theatre of Attack is masked by a kind of exalted self -love amongst the herd-members themselves so that they can always consider themselves to be victims of a scurrilous attack perpetrated by forces that are arrayed to destroy all that the sacred herd stands for, which, conveniently, is inter-changeable with the notion that what the herd stands for is that endless Snipe Hunt of what America Stands For. America’s greatness was once such that it stood for a lot because it was standing for liberty, in its widest possible sense. Now the nation staggers, like a drunk that promises he will reform if only he can enjoy one last session with the bottle. Perhaps we might hazard this chance to update…yes, let us “change” our national motto to “Now for a little hair of the dog that bit ye”. There is a little ribald parable from my Irish side of the family whose punch line is “Brace yerself Bridget ” but we shall not go there. Instead, suffice to say that American Liberty now simply means the right to be against something. The freedom to hate grows rank. Malign forces multiply exponentially.

This perpetual siege helmet has inculcated a kind of apocalyptic thinking on the part of the whipsawed American and when confronted with things apocalyptic, one naturally casts about for the Messiah who shall rescue us all. Don’t hold your breath. Messiahs don’t grow on trees. They most certainly do not emerge out of the heavily fertilized, yet decidedly septic seedbed of our current political carnival. What does grow on trees however is demagoguery and this messianic era produces bumper crops of the kind of demagogues we once sniffed out a mile away, when we still knew what this American Experiment was really about.

Everything I know I learned from the antique tourist plaques that adorned the family cabin tucked up in a narrow canyon beneath Mount Aire in the rugged Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Some still adorn my office walls even though the cabin has been lost to various familial dislocations. Aside from the Mule Deer fur fringed toilet seat with the admonition “Tickles, don’t it Walt?” or the clock with all fives that announced “No drinking till after 5″ and the crowd-pleasing “Bedroom Mood Meter”, my favorite five plaques inculcated my top-five lifetime convictions:

1. “The Hurrier I go, the Behinder I get”

2. “I Get my Exercise by Jumping to Conclusions”

3. “To Have a Friend, Be one”

4. Please Remain Seated While the Room is in Motion”

And my favorite,

5. “That Helping Hand You’re Looking For is at the End of your Own Damned Arm”

These tidy and polished little sentiments seem to be as charmingly antiquated as the little wooden tourist plaques themselves. Emblazoned with the location they were picked up from such as Pinedale, Wyoming or Mount Rushmore, South Dakota or Franconia Notch New Hampshire, the catchy slogans of American Tourist Traps once united us in a kind of hardy, straight-talk zeitgeist.  This unadorned mindset demonstrated its exceptional quality not in Federal Fiat and Realpolitik Proclamation but in the realms of everyday interaction, one by one within an America that was thankful for its fortunes rather than sadly reminiscent about them.

Here we are now in 2010. In altogether too many ways, it is an even more different world to 1980 than my 1965 was to 1935. We have moved forward technologically but seem to be on the brink of turning the clock back to another Depression or lingering recession. We may blame our fate upon a changed world but what has changed is more ourselves than the world we are forever trying to improve. We have slid complacently into the notion that not only does the American need their government to both protect them and, more importantly, to create the conditions for all of us to survive, but beyond that, we seem convinced that the rest of the world needs America to fight their own battles too. We oblige with vigor, assiduously turning Blowback into a National Death Cult where war is pronounced over but 50,000 troops remain behind to watch peace erupt out of the blasted newly minted democrats. Somebody once said “War is the Health of the State” but I’d say it’s more like a bloody ten-day drunk of the State.

Back here within the pseudo-secured “Homeland”, we are that needful thing called a consumer and now that our hearth has been under-water mortgaged upon the altar of consumption, there is no safe harbor for us to provision and so we bob about in a Great Flood of Quantitative Easing where no bailout can long keep up with the leaks. We are waiting with baited breath upon the various quacks and strivers who offer themselves as our “leaders”. To add insult to injury, the emphasis of these various messiahs is not upon the word “prosper” but upon the deep-seated fears of “survival”. In response to these fears, we herd up and cast about for more Messiahs to emerge and lead the flock to safety while raising a constant barrage of salty imprecation toward the titular heads of competing herds. This aint democracy, it is competition anarchy, it is politics as comedy Mexican Wrestling and anyone who is at the head of it is a successful marketeer of the inchoate fears that have come to bamboozle us now that we accept the role of victim. There is more than a little parable in the fact that the newly anointed Republican nominee for the Senate in Connecticut is the head of World Wrestling Entertainment… Incorporated. Irony manages one more weak wink here from its’ deathbed.

The strength of this nation has always been the self-effaced and hard-working dignity of an immigrant polity, which, through the luck of the draw found itself landed upon one of the more fecund sectors of a planet not completely known for reliable fecundity. The people’s government did not dwell in the house of apology nor fear or resignation. It was happy in its role as being that thing, and only that thing which was required to support, rather than dictate a civil, productively private society. There really can be too much of a good thing. A people can, over time, legislate itself out of the position which most safeguarded its’ success. So too can they mistake things private for exploitation and stingy greed. Free Enterprise is only truly free and vibrant when the widest number of its adherents is engaged in its profoundest opportunities. When Free Enterprise sanctions a selective priesthood, you can be sure that temples will be built to host a spectacle of sacrifice to distract the peasants from their declining fortunes. That Ceremony of Sacrifice is currently underway.

It is time to remember exactly what it was that led to our success. Success can be a prelude for disaster when those who enjoy it forget the history of that success and decline to observe the necessary obligations and abiding sacrifices of success. This malingering social disaster we now inhabit was long avoided because our chief check upon the soft underbelly of Democracy, the now-abandoned thing we call the Separation of Powers required that we check our hasty compulsions at the door and bring a deliberative mindset to the problems of our social intercourse. The Separation of Powers was a principal check upon our resigned messianic impulses. It made even large government seem somehow manageable. Presidents were our servants and not our cosseted superstars. Congress deliberated, it didn’t dither at the beck and call of campaign contributions.

That helping hand you are looking for is not and shall never come from a heavily financed campaign. The helping hand is at the end of your own arm and it gains its greatest strength from a very simple exercise. It shakes the hand of a neighbor and sets to work solving problems that lie directly in front of us rather than thousands of miles away in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or across the contentious sands of the Levant. More particularly, this helping hand tends to scoff at the manufactured problems emanating from that swamp hard on the banks of the river Potomac. Problems accumulate because our big government sentiments thrive on them. Washington needs a roster of changeable or mounting problems to justify its’ elaborately expensive existence. Problems are coming home to roost because we invite them to do so because we really think a Messiah is surely on our side and will automatically be delivered.

It won’t. Why? Because we do not either merit or need one when it comes to self-governance. Americans do not need a Messiah because this nation is not Heaven on Earth. It is a pretty damned good approximation of that halcyon thing but it is not, nor has it ever been, Heaven on Earth. Sometimes, it has been downright devilish but at least at those times in the past when this has been so, we were chastened by our apparent lapses and pulled in our horns and rolled up our sleeves and took our lumps and set back to work putting the house in order. At least we tried. Now we moan.

“Back to work”. Look at the fundamental beauty of those words. Hear the harmony of them. Feel these word’s beneficent calluses. Smell the lusty tones of sawdust or lathe oil as the meaning of these words roll off the tongue.

Back to work; it is a heady phrase, it is what we humans do before we can consume. We work. We work because it is what gives us meaning. We work because it displays our essential arts. We work because it is the resort of our self-respect. We work, not to survive, but to prosper. We work because we are principally producers before we are consumers. We work because it is the thoughts within our brain made real, apodictic and as imperishable as this ground upon which we stride. We work because it is damned satisfying at the end of a productive day. We work, at long last because we are humans and possess that combination of brains, digits, eyes, ears, vocal chords, legs, lungs and brawn which must have work in order to retain health and sanity. “Sapiens” perhaps but we humans must have work in order to be wise.

You want another morning in America? Then find someone who is not satisfied with hate, degradation, myth and the cant delivered by media privateers or their assigns and is more interested in that old museum piece of productive labor consigned to oblivion by an America of lost hopes built on credit cards and “Blue Dot Specials”. Find someone who works and then help them work and leave the demons to those who think demons are work rather than something self-created as a distraction from the thing we do best. We work. The best thing about this notion of an America at Work is that waste is revealed quickly in a world of work because, well, obviously and un-ironically, waste is, gee, its waste. It’s nothing to get overly alarmed about, waste happens but it is the byproduct of work, not the end product of it. Work likes produce, waste don’t. Waste is a distraction and must be subtracted from gross profits. Work, in the end is the bedrock bulwark of any self-respecting, self-starting democracy, representative or otherwise. I’m not talking about that insouciant word “jobs” here either; I’m talking about “work” and all, which it entails. A “job” can be doing the work of a trained chimp and hating every minute of it. “Work”, on the other hand is redolent of its companion word “skill”.

Just so there is no misunderstanding, this salute to work aint no diatribe against the pleasures of leisure. Leisure is one of the rewards of work. The problem with this America of debt -financed fear is that it has confused leisure with a job. Work is to be avoided, or at best simply endured on a road principally engaged in pursuing one’s leisure-time pursuits. Shopping is now, of course, a leisure-time pursuit and so if we must abjure labor on its behalf, then a credit card is always the best weapon. With this kind of mindset, leisure is loaded with recrimination because to have it, one must endure something objectionable. Then, when we are freed to pursue our various and accumulating leisure pursuits, they are more often than not marketed in a seductive manner, urging us to go into hawk to pursue them, making us engage in that detestable thing called a job in order to reach the higher plane of leisure time fun. Frustrated and forever dissatisfied at both work and play, we find ourselves upon a spinning treadmill of confused and resentful priorities.

Nor, for that matter, is this a paean to organized labor and a pillorying of Corporate America. Corporate America has hit itself squarely between the eyes on its own. It has coughed up a real primer on the downside of richly reimbursed idiocy and waste. While it has been bailed out by its assigns in Washington D.C. and so seems somehow immune from cause and effect, it will not remain so because it will continue to act against the long term interests of both itself and the citizenry. The reckoning will come. It always has. Perhaps then we might re-configure the power of the Corporate Model so that, among other things, it stops proudly wearing the dunce’s hat called “External Costs”. It seems to me that to compete against China and a cooperative Europe or rising Latin America in the modern world, we are going to have to possess a full arsenal of all the tools required for a powerful economic condition. We will need all our tricks from corporate power to individual working skill. After all, there is a certain civil beauty to the idea of a strong working productivity bolstered by Corporate power functioning within an economic version of our political Separation of Powers.

Punch in America, go to work again. If you do so, you’ll find you don’t really think much about those “leaders” and huckster Messiahs in Washington because they will waste your time and if there is anything an America at Work needs to stop doing immediately is wasting time. 310,115,985 people within a prodigious, well-watered land of 3.8 million square miles are an awful lot of work opportunity. Go ahead, let all the World Improvers who make their living spinning webs of intrigue accuse you of isolationism because it is an isolationism of best resort, it is isolating one’s best shot at opportunity or success and working toward it. Just like those Mt. Aire cabin plaques asserted, the helping hand you’re looking for is at the end of your own arm and if you want a friend, you need to act like one. More importantly, the messiah you are looking for is your neighbor. Shake their hand and then, well… get to work, dammit.

Davis, California. “Technique” is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. As Jacques Ellul argues in The Technological Society, in such a society the multiplicity of means is reduced to one: the most efficient. The individual participates in society only to the degree that he becomes subordinate to the search for efficiency. Although our civilization sets the highest value on relations, the structures of our world and its real norms favor the antithesis of relationships.

Two recent articles about food in our hometown newspaper caught my attention.  Before I describe them and the relationship I see between them and Ellul’s writing on technique, I want to take you on a short bike ride in the area around my town.

My town runs about 6 miles, east to west, straddles a major interstate, a long-haul, and a commuter train line.  It runs about 3 miles north to south, bisected by another (smaller) “freeway.”  Cycling around town is fun, but the real treat lies in reaching the outskirts and suddenly finding oneself surrounded by fields, and, a bit farther away, orchards and vineyards.  The fields change with the seasons, but here in the valley there is almost always something growing.  Head east this time of year, and you will run into safflower and rice; to the south, corn, tomatoes and sunflowers; on the west side, more tomatoes, peppers and then plums along with all manner of tree nuts; north, still more corn, more tomatoes and various clovers and grasses. Further on, you will reach vineyards on the edge of the coastal hills.  Later in the year we will have more clover and other grasses, and the time will come for the harvesting of all those nuts. We will crush the wine grapes as the leaves of their vines turn bright red.

With a little water (which we borrow from the coastal hills, and draw from the ground and the river) things shoot up quickly around here, an occurrence that never seems to stop.

Right next to these fields is one of the world’s largest and most prestigious public universities, which specializes in crop, soil, and food sciences, agricultural economics and nutrition. Major food companies have research sites around town (we rode by a few).  A well-educated populace lives on these tree-lined streets, comprising a very participatory form of local government.

Now that our bike ride is over, let’s return to the newspaper articles. The first, ”From Farm to Table,” discusses a new USDA study showing that farmers keep a greater share of the money spent on their products when they sell what they grow directly to consumers via farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) groups. The article also shares that farmers benefit more from selling directly to supermarkets than from selling to wholesalers. (I will acknowledge that I am surprised that it took a study to demonstrate any of this.)

The same study, however, shows that it costs less in terms of “fuel consumed per pound of produce” to ship food longer distances on larger trucks—the kind wholesalers use—from larger monoculture farms. Here we make our first encounter with the “efficiency” criterion that Ellul understood so well.  Just as it is more efficient to ship food long distances in large quantities to markets where people are eager to pay more to get it because they can’t grow the same foods nearby, so local stores also find it less efficient to buy directly from local farmers instead of from wholesalers. The article quotes the manager of a local food co-op who wants to buy from local farms. He says, “It’s harder to buy locally. . . . Instead of one invoice and one bill from a single wholesaler, the co-op wheels and deals with 50 little farms all over the area.”

Thankfully, this co-op is committed to “buying local,” and does so because its owners (of which I am one) place a high level of importance on buying locally. This co-op, however, is only one of 6 or 7 “supermarkets” in town, and the only one with these commitments.  Though the manager doesn’t say it directly, it is simply not efficient for him to purchase from all those small suppliers.  Still, the fact that the co-op is doing so shows that Ellul’s efficiency imperative is not an inevitable condition. We can choose to live differently.

Unfortunately, food sold through the co-op, our local farmers’ market, and the CSAs seem to be a very small drop in a huge local food bucket. The second article, “Farmers Ask for Support,” makes this clear. The article is not about local farmers asking for some kind of government handout.  Rather, it is a cry for help in a world in which they are smothered from all sides. The article starts with these words: “Local agriculture must connect the dots between farmers who grow tomatoes, walnuts and peaches and the people who eat them. Trouble is: There aren’t enough dots.”

It continues to make the sad and startling data point that, “Local residents eat 2.2 million tons of food each year. However, less than 2 percent of that comes from local growers.”

To call this crazy—as one of the farmers in the article does—is clearly an understatement.  Connecting the dots—or, perhaps, putting a puzzle together, is difficult. For example, tomato-processing operations have largely moved out of the county because it is more efficient to consolidate operations and truck tomatoes from long distances for processing than to process them closer to the fields in which they are grown.

Crazier still, while all these fruits and vegetables sit nearby in our fields and orchards, up to 25% of our population register as obese. Only 16% of us are eating the recommended 2 or more servings of fruit and 3 or more servings of vegetables per day.[1] In other words, we are eating highly processed “food” that starts in our fields, gets shipped away, is processed elsewhere and is then sent back loaded with lots of non-food products(to prolong its shelf life), fat, and sugar.

Our farmers are under great pressure to sell their land to developers who want to build homes for the growing numbers of people who want to move to this valley.  Because it is harder for farmers to survive on their land, they are sorely tempted to sell it to these newcomers and to developers.  This forces local government to raise money from private sources to preserve the farmland (as farmland) because the people farming it can no longer afford to farm it.

This is a crazy and puzzling system indeed.  Clearly “individual” decisions about efficiency have led us down this path.  As Ellul warned, the “système technicien” is made up of highly specialized technicians who know their work very well. They know the “one best way” in their area of specialization. They know their piece of the puzzle, but they do not concern themselves with the puzzle as a whole or whether the puzzle contributes to community development.  As Joyce Hanks, interpreting Ellul’s The Technological Society observed:

“True development leads to consequences that are not predetermined but that stem from value judgments hammered out by a group working together.  Growth based on Technique and efficiency, however, tends to produce something like puzzle pieces that no longer fit together, at least not in the way we intended them to.”[2]

Here are the local puzzle pieces that we somehow need to fit together: great farms; committed, hard working farmers; a university of world class researchers; a highly participatory local political system; obesity; unemployment; lack of food processing capacity; plentiful fresh food that doesn’t reach our plates; farmers going out of business; and fundraisers to buy farmland that people can’t farm.

Ellul would say that our faith in Technique and efficiency created the puzzle pieces.  Our highly specialized data-driven, empirically correct, and narrow decision-making processes built the system that, arguably, serves no one’s human needs. As Ellul argued, this occurs because Technique does not evolve with the end of human good in mind.  It pursues no end, in fact, and is only concerned with the “best” means. Hanks points to a solution, wherein the farmers, elected officials, agricultural economists, soil scientists, consumers, and store owners sit down together and “judge the values” that should drive our food system. This means, essentially, that we must discuss the proper ends of our food system.

First, we need some old-fashioned confession and repentance. I use overtly religious language because our faith in Technique is religious.  We need to confess that our allegiance to “efficiency” has brought us here. We need to acknowledge that Technique has not liberated or helped us to better development, but has given us a scattered system of puzzle pieces that we cannot piece together in a way that serves human needs.  Confession will free us to discuss what we all really want, and what we, as humans, really need.  It will be akin to an A.A. meeting for the addicts of efficiency, where we can stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Robb and I’m addicted to the narrow quest for efficiency–the “one best way,” and then we can move on and put our collective lives in order.

I know that I have much to learn and to understand. In the meantime, I am going out to the fields around my house. I will work with some farmers and find out what I am missing and begin my apprenticeship in the fields. Then, I am going to sit with some friends and neighbors to talk about growing and consuming food, and what it is we all really need. Hopefully, I can help bring folks together to begin piecing the puzzle together.

[2] “Jacques Ellul on Development: Why it Doesn’t Work” The Ellul Forum. page 6, Issue 10, January 1993-emphasis added.

—–

Robb Davis has worked in the field of maternal and child health, nutrition and food security, mostly in West Africa and the Indian Subcontinent, for nearly 25 years.

Rock Island, IL

Five o’clock on a summer Saturday morning and not a minute to lose! Soon it will be suppertime.

Out of bed and down the stairs. The knees snap and crack. The left plantar loosens in muted shrieks agony. But so what if the flesh be weak? The spirit is willing. This body—this failing creaking tomb-doomed body—will have its moment this very day in the late summer sun.

For oh! the fullness of man! The groaning rag-weed-sneezing splendor of the incarnate condition! Tonight’s meal will remind us that the labor of six days, and not only The Lord God Almighty’s, was all very good.

5:02 at the coffee pot with its built-in timer. O Thou timer! The greatest of all inventions. First the smell and now the taste of French roast. How it greets me! Me, the chief of sinners!

Amazing love! How can it be
That oh these beans have found out me?

The synapses fire. Brain and mind alike jump to life. Nabokov, you were right. There is nothing like coffee in an empty stomach to clear and enervate the head.

In no less than twelve hours I’ll be cooking for five. What to do first. What to do. . . .

I know! Read!

Ah! My chair, my footstool, my end table, the birds at their matins outside my window, the rosy-fingered dawn creeping up on me. Who does not adore so great a thing of beauty as Dawn’s early crack?

The pages turn to count the clock that tells the time; hideous night rises to brave day. Where has this novel been all my life? And what is that I hear? What but the stirrings of my first-born son. He wants me to himself. And who wouldn’t? I took him and the others, one and all, for local ice cream last night. I’m Father of the Year.

No “good morning, Dad.” No greeting whatsoever. It’s a waste of time for the child of my right hand, and joy. He wants to know if we’re going to the market.

We are.

On bikes?

Of course on bikes.

“Yes!” he says, and off he goes to dress himself. If I am not mistaken, he’ll come back down in shorts, a tee shirt, a ball cap, and Converse All-Stars. He’ll also have some loose change in his pocket for the musicians down at the market, who deserve his largesse. (It’s my largesse.)

He descends in shorts, a tee shirt, a ball cap, and Converse All-Stars, and out he goes to get the bikes—his new Schwinn, which somehow made it down the chimney last Christmas, and my old one, which is so ugly and so “out-of-date” that not even the hobos will steal it. You may have seen it before. It’s an antique machine, and a beautiful-ugly one at that, with a milk crate band-clamped to the back rack. It weighs more than anyone tall enough to ride it.

We check the tires and off we go into the morning air! Down into the river valley and up onto the bridge. O Mississippi, thou storied river! Speak! Sing to us ere you roll to that warm sunlit basin of ancient sunlight. O thou muddy waters! What soil and oil await thee in the troubled, the too too sullied gulf. Soft you now! Slow be thy flowing, thou river of all my days and ways!

We whiz down the nether side and coast along the Iowa bike path. It fairly throbs with life. Ahead of us two young studs are out for a morning run. I catch in them the image of my former self. They are swift and light and unconquerable. What beautiful strides they have. My knees call out to them. Nay, to the skies they call out. Why must my days be three-score year and ten but only two-score minus five be allotted to my joints?

We pass an abandoned building where a crypto-graffitist is wont to leave his mark. And lo! He has struck again: “flesmihkcufognacsucitammargoramvrekinomehtybseogohwdrawoceht,” if I remember aright. What can it mean?

Never mind. Nor do I envy these glorious runners their youth. Let them run and eat and love. I’m peddling with my boy to the market and looking out at the river as the sun grows round this very day, my heart vibrating to the iron string of a summer mood. There will be plump tomatoes and stiff cukes, sweet corn aplently and garlic and onions and cilantro and chickens and buffalo meat. There will be music and smoke from the grills and girls in summer dresses, wine and honey and pastries, friends to greet, enemies to avoid, peaches to taste, bird houses to admire (and copy), and my boy tugging at my shirt and saying, “Daddy, may I have a lemonade?”

O, my handsome growing infuriating boy, you may! Here. Get two. We’ll toast the numerous goings-on of life.

Aging heart of mine, if you should throw a calcium deposit now. . . . Don’t do it, foolish foolish heart. Not now. Not yet. Beat on, old heart. I’ve got to cook for five tonight. Heart of gold, keep me searching. I’ve got another boy, a boy full of piss and vinegar, it is true, but a boy all the same, and a graceful girl coming of age, and (oh!) a bride these many years ready to say, “I know you of old, you old goat! Come here, you!”

(And, God help me, I will. I will.)

To the chicken man I go. A whole fryer, a dozen brown eggs, and a little banter—until a more shapely patron steps up. I know when I’m beat. I’m off to get my beans, my sweet corn, my tomatoes, my white onion, my blue potatoes from the ragged boys calling themselves the Mad Farmers.

So they know, then! Well they’re getting my money, I can tell you. Long may they thrive. May they live to write their own manifestoes and to sow their timothy in the moonlight and to come into the peace of wild things.

My boy! Where is he? Ah! There he is, listening to the jazz combo and scaring up the nerve to toss them a few quarters. Which he does.

“So, how much did you give them?”

“A few quarters.”

“Of your own?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you, buddy.” (The bass player was once a student of mine.) “Now let’s hit the bikes.”

And we do, and my milk crate is loaded for bear. It’ll be a tougher ride across the river and up our side of the river valley, but we make it at last. Into the fridge go the frigeables. I leave the fryer out to defrost. Foghorn Leghorn, I tell you verily: Old Square Britches will be our main fare tonight. God bless the gal for what she laid and for what (and whom) she didn’t and for giving herself to our board this very night. How I shall relish her!

But it ain’t night yet. It ain’t even eleven o’clock in the morning.

Oh to be standing in the kitchen now, pressing garlic, sautéing yellow onion in butter. To be at the grill turning the plump breasts and the dark thighs and the damn-nigh meatless back over the glowing coals.

But the day’s work lies ahead: grass to cut, traps to check (and, perhaps, dead groundhogs discreetly to dispose of), oil to change, this and that to fix, and—damn me to the outer darkness—did I really promise to make Inigo Montoya swords for the boys? I did.

So then to cut, to check, to dispose of (it’s a 25-pounder if it weighs an ounce), to change, to fix, and at last, after cranking up the garage radio to “The ’70s with Steve Goddard” and cracking a can of the sudsy stuff, to design swords on a scrap of plywood. Jigsaw, clamps, and sandpaper at the ready, boys poised—nay, baited— and I (no longer Father of the Year but of the Decade) about to go to work.

And after the careful cutting (my old impatient neighbor tells me I’d separate black from white in pigeon shit) and the sanding we discover that the swords, which are made of plywood, look like plywood, whereas they’re supposed to be silver.

To the hardware we go for paint and, no doubt, a jawbreaker apiece and a promotion for yours truly to Father of the Galaxy, while the beneficiaries of the jawbreakers are sworn to secrecy from You Know Who.

The painting done, the swords dry, the work pronounced “very good”–it can only mean that the fighting may now begin. And so it does (“… you killed my father. Prepare to die!”).

So be it. I at last am ready to do the day’s real work, which begins with cutting the chicken.

Some people buy their chickens already cut—to “save time” or “cut down on labor.” I confess I don’t understand this at all. I want to increase my time in the kitchen. I want more work to do. There’s music to listen to, and a drinky-poo to get through, and a shimmering vibrant woman to nudge and pinch and bump against. Shorten the time for this? Inconceivable!

Michael Buble’s birds fly high on the hi-fi. Old Granddad’s in the tumbler where he belongs. I begin cutting the chicken my way: first the wings, then the legs, then the thighs. Then I separate the back from the breasts, and then I separate the breasts. My spirits soar.

Now a careful chef might have done this the day before in order to brine the chicken. Great idea. I’ll do this myself occasionally. But in the summer I like to cut the bird I bought that morning and carted home on my old ugly Schwinn. So I do. And then I salt the bejeezis out of it. Shake shake shake. Shake shake shake. Shake your shaker. Shake your shaker.

So sing I as I salinate the bird, and if I am not mistaken the jewel of my eye, passing through the kitchen, rolls her eyes and disappears. Her scorn and indifference can mean only one thing! What a lucky devil I am.

And then I shuck the corn and lay it by. And I snip the beans and put them in the steamer and lay them by.

I light the water on the stove and then I light the grill. I’m a charcoal and/or wood man by training, by discipline, and by moral commitment. You grillers with gas, I extend my hand to you in friendship even though I cannot credit your way. But Old Granddad has kicked in; the gears are turning nicely, and I, so long a worshipper of charcoal, greet you in brotherly affection. Let us not quarrel on this splendid summer Saturday.

Back to the kitchen. There must be salsa. So I chop the tomatoes, the white onion, the cilantro, and a wee bit of heat off a fresh cayenne pepper newly plucked from the garden. Squeeze the key limes, pour on the salt, and we’re ready for the chips.

We? Lo! I’m alone! I’m Mr. Flood. I raise the tumbler to no one: “here’s to no one’s showing up.”

Great Scott! I almost forgot the Greek salad! Cut some fresh oregano from the crop out back. Chop more tomatoes, cukes, red onion, and feta cheese. Grind in the pepper, shake in the salt, press in the mother lode of raw garlic, and shower on the oregano. (You users of dried oregano, I extend my hand to you too.) Drizzle on the olive oil and toss the colorful mix. (Place the vinegar at hand for those who use it. You users of vinegar, join the ranks of those who grill with gas and dabble in dried oregano. For O magnanimous me! I befriend you this very day.)

Bread? Why not! A simple baguette will do.

Into a bowl goes a bottle of barbeque sauce—I’m ecumenical on this score: let local tastes prevail—and out to the grill I go, heavily armed with a dead chicken, sauce, a brush, grill tongs, and the residue of the Old Grandad (with maybe a little more added for good luck). I ring the dinner bell. This signifies that it’s time for someone to set the table, toss in the corn, and for everyone else to move tableward, a process that includes rebellion, tantrums, urination, and protracted hand-washing.

I, for my part, am going to look out upon the waning summer light, watch the finches and the hummingbirds, question the squirrels frolicking on the redbud tree, commune with Granddad, reflect upon the glorious day, congratulate myself on my promotion to Father of the Galaxy, and grill my bird in solitude.

Once the pieces are nearly done, I start brushing them with sauce, turning them in order to cook the sauce in, and then I brush them some more. When at last they’re done, I put them on a platter and drown them in more sauce. If a little is good, a lot is better.

And then I present myself to the table—now set and laden and peopled—as Lord of the Grill and Father of the Galaxy.

No one notices. There’s a fight over who gets to pronounce the blessing, a fight about which, at this point, I’m agnostic. Once arms and hands and fingers have duly crossed the torsos, chaos ensues.

But above it all I hear Mozart speaking to me across the centuries, and oh how I relish the tastes, the joys of the fullness of man, the incarnate condition …

And suddenly there is only carnage before me. The children are out in the warm and never-ending summer evening; their mother, whom I fain would toss upon the turnips, is knocking about in the kitchen.

I kick her out of doors with an amorous foot applied to a splendid bottom. What a lucky foot!

The reward for my labors isn’t what you’re thinking, you lecherous loyal reader. My reward is to be left alone to clean the mise en place, to listen to what I want to listen to, and, at long last, after baths and stories and resistance thereto, which is the way of things on long summer evenings, to end the day as I began it—in my chair with my book. Where has it been all my life?

“The old view (education of democratic man) was that, by recognizing and accepting man’s natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness.  Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers.  The immigrant had to put behind him the claims of the Old World in favor of a new and easily acquired education.  This did not necessarily mean abandoning old daily habits or religions, but it did mean subordinating them to new principles.  There was a tendency, if not a necessity, to homogenize nature itself.” (p. 27, italics added)

How say those on the Porch about the desirability of homogenizing nature?  What about the PoMo’s?

Claremont, CA

This is not news to those of us who spend a lot of time around 20-somethings, those of us who were recently 20-somethings, and those of us who are still ensconced in that decade of life. It’s a question that I’ve heard friends and former students ponder with some regularity: Why is it taking so long for Americans to become “real” grown-ups?

Sadly, the Times article gets caught up in the rather dubious assertions of research psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, who wants to claim that this extended adolescence – he calls it “emerging adulthood” – actually represents a natural “life stage,” though passing through the stage is neither universal nor necessary, and thus does not seem to meet even the most generous definition of what counts as part of our human nature.

Although the article mentions scientific evidence that your brain continues to change throughout your 20s, which some have taken as “proof” of a biological basis for extended adolescence, it overlooks the obvious dimension in which extended adolescence does not accord with our biology: reproduction.  As numerous studies have suggested, the increasing numbers of women who put off trying to have children until their mid-30s or later “worsen their chances of becoming pregnant—and risk losing out on motherhood altogether.” Even though Hollywood offers us lots of stories about celebrities who get pregnant in their 40s, female fertility starts to decline at around age 30, meaning that expensive technologies are often behind those high-profile births. It seems hard to argue that decades of birth-control use followed by desperate attempts to get pregnant followed by a painful spate of IVF treatment (which is less than 10% successful for women over 40) clearly represents the female body’s “natural” biological course.

In any case, in all of its attention to this single theory, the Times Magazine article fails to spend enough time considering questions of the most immediate social and political relevance: How do we understand this cohort of Americans? How did they get here?

Those questions become even more interesting if you consider how unlikely this outcome might have seemed a decade ago. Consider the other great journalistic piece written about this generation of Americans: David Brooks’ “The Organization Kid,” which appeared in The Atlantic back in April of 2001. There, Brooks described a generation of elite college students – today’s late 20-somethings – who “work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life.” Brooks described a generation of young people who were not just eager to become grownups but were in some ways already grownups: “goal-oriented,” willing to take on substantial responsibilities, and possessing a “calm acceptance of established order.”

Juxtaposing that article with last Sunday’s offering in the Times Magazine, you have to wonder: What happened to all those Organization Kids, to land them in this “Post-Adolescent, Pre-Adult, Not-Quite-Decided Stage” nine years later? Are these even the same people? On the surface they seem to be made of quite different stuff.

The first possibility to consider is that one (or both) of these articles simply isn’t true. Each has its faults. Brooks’ piece includes some obvious overstatements and selection biases, and last week’s Times Magazine piece has a scattershot approach. (It should go without saying, too, that both pieces devote most of their energy to the study of relatively privileged Americans.)

But on the whole, both pieces have been widely distributed, suggesting that they that they rang (or ring) true to their readers. Both pieces, I think it is fair to say, touched a cultural nerve at the moment of their publication. And my own experiences confirm the picture each article paints: I was a graduate student at Princeton in 2001, when Brooks wrote “The Organization Kid” about the lives of its undergraduates, and his assessment more-or-less accorded with my own perception of things. Today, the many 20-somethings I count among my friends and former students tend to fit the patterns of behavior discussed in the Times article. Despite their limitations, then, I think it is reasonable to trust the general observations each article makes.

It’s also possible that Organization Kids became Extended Adolescents due to economic forces largely outside their control. That is, Organization Kids weren’t bound to become Extended Adolescents; an external economic shock changed them profoundly during the last 10 years.

There is undoubtedly some truth here. When Brooks spent time with Princeton undergraduates in 2001, they were facing “the sweetest job market in the nation’s history,” and each student he met “felt confident that he or she could get a good job after graduation.” Needless to say, the job market feels different to everyone today, and it’s not hard to imagine the many structural reasons that lots of those go-getting, would-be consultants and bankers might have changed their plans, or had their plans dashed, or moved back in with mom and dad, or ended up applying to law school, thereby extending their financial dependency.

In 2001, Brooks did notice that Princeton students worked hard in large part because of their expectations of advancement, that they were not bolstered by “some Puritan work ethic deep in their cultural memory.” Looking back now, it seems clear that these were students who had not learned, through experience or education, the truth that tides do not always rise and fortunes do not always accrue. Such students aspired to adulthood under certain terms (of perpetual growth, constant opportunity, and increasing reward); absent the continued existence of those terms, it may be that they had little independent reason – or had been given little independent reason – to value the dedicated pursuit of a “grown-up” life.

Even so, the external-shock explanation only goes so far. For one thing, at least for elite college graduates, employment is not as difficult to procure as most national-level statistics suggest. The job market for college grads – even graduates of schools not as fancy as Princeton – is much better than the job market as a whole. At the most select schools, career prospects remain strong; a survey at my own Pomona College shows that about half of our 2010 graduates had received offers of full-time employment before they had even graduated. There has been an economic shock to this population, to be sure, but not an entirely earth-shattering one. Even if the current state of the economy has exacerbated the extension of adolescence or explains it in part, it is not the whole story.

Indeed, nine years ago Brooks gave us reasons to suspect that there are more than external or economic forces at play in the transition from Organization Kid to Extended Adolescent. He saw characteristics in those apparently go-getting college students that at the time seemed to put them on the fast track to early adulthood, but may in fact have propelled them right back into their parents’ fold and into a delayed adulthood.

While the Organization Kids were highly ambitious, they weren’t particularly daring; Brooks was surprised by how “safety-conscious” and risk-averse those college students were. It would make sense that risk-averse people would, on the whole, be reluctant to make major life changes – to strike out on their own, to commit to a career path or a spouse, or to have children – that are inherently risky or non-reversible propositions. (Risk-averse people make good test-takers, and they often perform well as students, but they are less likely to thrive when they are asked to take on the less-structured roles of citizen, grown-up, and leader.)

Some of that risk-avoidant behavior surely owes to a phenomenon mentioned in both “The Organization Kid” and “The Post-Adolescent, Pre-Adult, Not-Quite-Decided Life Stage,” the phenomenon we tend to call “helicopter parenting.” We all know what this means: various studies have documented a decline in the amount of “risky play,” like climbing trees and playing tag, allowed by parents, and “unsupervised play” is also out-of-fashion, particularly among wealthier Americans. Brooks described the Organization Kids as students who had been “structured, supervised, and stuffed with enrichment” by other people for their whole lives. Not much has changed ten years later, it seems, as the parents of the Extended Adolescent “keep hovering and problem-solving long past the time when their children should be solving problems on their own.”

Recent technologies are somewhat to blame for all this hovering; cell phones and the Internet, by allowing for constant communication, enable a kind of anxious connection between parents and children. The scale of our society, too, bears some responsibility here; who can blame parents for being more worried about their children when the nation they inhabit seems so big, so contentious, and so unforgiving?

Still, I think of Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the education of young women in 1830s America. Tocqueville was impressed by the fact that Americans thought young women should be educated for more than domestic life. The reason for that, Tocqueville writes, was that Americans realized they lived in a world of rapid change, vast scale, and great danger, and they had the best way to prepare their daughters for that world was to teach them about – and expose them to – its vices and temptations. In the face of a big and scary country, they encouraged a certain kind of exposure to risk with the idea that it would strengthen our children in the end, while we perceive risk and run in the opposite direction.

Of course, those earlier Americans were much more accustomed to human death than we are. Then, death was not consigned to nursing homes and freak accidents, the way it is in the lives of so many Americans today. There were then better-defined rituals for grieving and loss and mourning, sustained by community and religious tradition. In such a context, as others have said, death and mortality hold less raw terror than they do in a society such as ours, in which avoidance and even denial of death are commonplace.

I don’t mean to suggest that those Americans of the 1830s were all throwing their kids into the Reaper’s arms. But it does seem that they were more comfortable than we are with the fact that all parents and children someday part, and as a result they raised their children differently than do we. Those Americans of Tocqueville’s time, that is, were in some ways more in touch with the reality of human embodiedness, with human mortality – with human biology.

In the end, then, maybe the phenomenon of 20-somethings who are delaying adulthood does have something to do with biology: our cultural denial and dismissal of our embodiedness. We deny certain truths about reproduction and birth on one hand, and certain truths about death on the other. That denial is as in evidence in the Times Magazine piece as it is in the lives of the 20-somethings it discusses.

Back in 2001, in the first and most telling paragraphs of his article, Brooks mentioned in passing that the Princeton students he met were already well-ensconced in the habit of putting their “biological necessities” on a back burner. They told him they were planning to wait to have “real relationships” until after their careers were settled, at some undetermined point in the future. The seeds of extended adolescence, it’s clear, were well-sown before any of these people had turned 20.

At the time, Brooks used the language of “character” to describe what he found lacking in the Princeton student body. That language isn’t bad, although it risks suggesting that there is a problem in the character of a particular generation of students or 20-somethings (or “those kids today”), when it seems clear to me that the problem lies in a national character, in this nation where we are obsessed with time-saving devices even as we deny the big-picture ways in which all of our time – to be kids, to be grown-ups, to be ourselves – is limited.

To adjust to economic realities, my wife and I also moved from the leafy neighborhood of Chestnut Hill into Center City, Philadelphia. Urban centers, especially in the Northeast, are the rare places that make life possible without a car. I have agrarian friends in rural Virginia who need to drive their pick-up trucks at least a mile just to pick up the mail. In Philadelphia, car rentals are possible by the hour. But the city’s public transportation system is very good even if quirky and still in need of some upgrades. And if residents are willing to use their solar-powered bodies to make up the difference between the buildings they want to enter and the nearest train or subway station, they can – with the help of SEPTA – go almost anywhere in the Delaware Valley.

So instead of driving, my wife and I walk – a lot. I even walk to purchase beer, which is something of a nuisance in Pennsylvania where cases are much cheaper (per bottle) than six-packs from the local package store. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board – a Prohibition-Era agency – still controls the sale and distribution of wine and hard liquor. Beer distributors sell cases. Bars and some delicatessens sell six packs. This means I need to walk a little more than a mile each way to buy a case from one of the city’s very good micro-breweries. (The Hart favorite these days is Yard’s IPA.) But a two-wheeled shopping cart makes this a fairly easy outing as long as the weather cooperates.

Less cooperative are the automobiles that cities allow us to give up. Sidewalks are increasingly crowded with hot dog and newspaper vendors, as well as restaurants that turn open sidewalks into outdoor cafes. Sidewalks also become the favorite site for renovation and construction projects. In all of these cases, city officials would never countenance taking away a lane of traffic. Instead, they pass the pain along to pedestrians. In our section of downtown Philadelphia, we needed to cross the street twice to avoid construction projects on either approach to our high-rise building.

When you consider the number of pedestrians competing for sidewalk space compared to the number of car occupants, the fight seems rigged. The average sidewalk is ten feet wide. That means that roughly four people – more likely three of polite dispositions — can pass comfortably. The average two-lane street is seventeen feet wide. At best, the average car is carrying two occupants. Which means that about the same number (four) of car occupants as pedestrians may pass safely down a space almost twice as large as the sidewalk. On our street in Philadelphia, not one of the busiest for traffic, the pedestrians are likely four times the number of car occupants on the average block. That means that people in cars take up a disproportionate amount of space. Does this give me license to hate car drivers? I know what Jesus would do: hate the car, love the car driver.

One of my favorite authors shared these sentiments when he lived in Center City and fought proposed jaywalking legislation. That man is J. Gresham Machen who moved to Philadelphia in 1929 from Princeton to start a seminary that would rival the Presbyterian one in Princeton that he suspected was guilty of bad Calvinism (yes, there is a good variety). Machen enjoyed walking, and was especially fond of reading pocket-sized editions of the Loeb Classics while he walked to and from class. The thought of having to wait for cars was anathema.

He also had a point when he wrote a letter to one of the city newspapers – he also testified before city council – about the mind set of city planners who were opening up Philadelphia to automobiles and their drivers.

. . . I am dead opposed to subjecting a whole city because of the comparatively few incautious people to a treadmill regime like that which prevails in Western cities. I resent such a regime for myself. I have tried it, and I know that it prevent me from the best, and simplest pleasure that a man can have, which is walking. But I resent it particularly because it is a discrimination against the poor and in favor of the rich.

That brings us to the real purpose of these laws, which is not that pedestrians should be spared injury but that motorists should be spared a little inconvenience. I drive a car from the driver’s point of view. I know how trifling is the inconvenience which is saved thus at the expense of the liberty of the poorer people in the community. Indeed, I do not believe that in the long run it is for the benefit even of the motorist. I think it is a dreadful thing to encourage in the motorist’s mind, as these laws unquestionably do, the notion that he is running on something like a railroad track cleared for his special benefit.

I am prone to similar resentments when I see the way that business owners, city officials, policies, and laws give more consideration to drivers than pedestrians. (Pedestrians themselves are not blameless when it comes to provoking frustration in other pedestrians – a subject for another post.) None of this is so bad that I’d prefer to live somewhere else. The advantages of living without a car are greater than the annoyance of negotiating their presence. But cities would be grand if city governments prohibited cars.

Then again, I would be glad to make room for a car like this.

“The sleekest revolutions,” notes Barry Lynn, “are won not at the barricades but in the dictionary.” To control the terms of a debate is to control the outcome. This is certainly true of the term “free market,” a term which has come to mean almost its opposite, and hence a system which is manifestly unfree. The claim that our markets are not free is a serious one, and should only be made on serious evidence, just the kind of evidence that Barry Lynn provides in Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.

The surest sign that a market is free is that it is competitive; there should be a rich variety of products provided by a vast number of firms, a situation which affords entrepreneurs many opportunities to enter the market and workers many places to sell their labor. And when we waltz into our local Wal Mart, that is what we seem to see. Alas, it is an illusion of competition rather than the reality. For example, if you want eyeglasses, you can go to Pearl Vision, or Lenscrafters, Sears Optical, JC Penney, Target, Macy’s, Sunglass Hut, or buy frames from 25 different manufacturers. Surely choice and competition prevail in this market. But no. All of these are one company, the Italian conglomerate Luxottica. And as with glasses, so also with so many other products. Most of our beer—even some that try to pass themselves off as “craft” beer—is provided by just two companies, ImBev of Belgium or the South African Brewing Company. Proctor & Gamble provides 75% of razors, 60% of detergent, 50% of feminine pads, etc. Even what few companies remain in each market often engage in collusion rather than competition. Wal Mart, for example, appoints one company as a “category manager” to allocate shelf space for all the “competing” companies.

Another sign of a free market is the expansive space it provides for entrepreneurs. But from 1948-2003, self-employment in America dropped from 18.5% to 7.5%. Indeed, among developed nations only Luxembourg has a lower rate of self-employment than we do. There has been a new “enclosure” movement, as the spaces that used to be occupied by small retailers, farmers, and manufacturers have been colonized by the conglomerates.

So how did we get to a situation where the “freedom of markets” has come to mean “servility” and corporate control? Lynn recounts this history, but those who expect a neat tale of “conservatives” versus “liberals” (Lynn prefers the term “progressives”) will be disappointed. Rather, the two cooperated to produce the servile state. In our colonial history, open markets were the means to escape the network of feudal dependencies that governed European systems. In the open market, small landowners and laborers could freely trade their produce and gain independence. Hence, the early Republic kept a watchful eye on the corporate and financial powers. But that care began to break down with the Civil War, as the government directed millions to industry, and the corporations were able to free themselves from control of the states and gain new privileges, even becoming, in a bit of Supreme Court legislation, “legal persons.” For the rest of the century, the “Robber Barons” consolidated their hold on industry after industry to become the dominant force in society and government.

Liberals like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have a problem with the trusts per se, they just wanted them more tightly controlled by the government. In the “progressive” view, there was a correct “scientific” technique of management, one that could be more easily applied when industries were gathered into the large corporate collectives. The New Deal evolved a system that was actually a continuation of Herbert Hoover’s associationalism,which placed the management of the economy in “super-cartels” and was related to the system used in Italy under Mussolini. But the Hoover/Roosevelt vision at least provided for a variety of quasi-owners of the cartels: workers, engineers, managers, the government, and small shareholders were all protected by institutional arrangements. And the corporations themselves were to be the guardians of our industrial base and a tool in foreign policy.

At this point, you have a quasi-feudal system with a series of mutual rights and obligations between varies interests and classes. There would be a relative abundance for all, wealth for a few, all directed by a combination of benevolent government and corporations with a broad social mandate, and subject to the influence of a variety of “owners.” But one by one, the “owners” were stripped off. It began in the Carter administration with deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, the prototype for further deregulation. It was continued under Reagan, who offered few institutional changes but made it clear that his administration would not enforce the anti-trust laws, and he made open war on the unions. But the so-called “Reagan Revolution” was actually consolidated under Bill Clinton with NAFTA and the deregulation of the financial industry. With the “democratization” of the stock market, the general public came to believe that equities were better than savings, and they began to view themselves as little moguls, their interests identified with the large investors. The senior managers saw more and more of their pay tied to stock options, which meant their interests were now also more aligned with the large investors. Outsourcing did for both the unions and the engineers. Only the large investors and their financial backers remained in effective control of the corporate structures, and only their interests would count.

What were these interests? Under the guidance of Milton Friedman, the corporation was converted from a system of governance charged with a broad social mandate into a private property whose “one and only one social responsibility” is to “increase profits.” But profits can be increased by strip-mining a company as much as by investing in it. And that is what has happened, as manufacturing firms converted themselves into trading conglomerates, outsourcing production to third-world countries but maintaining control at the center. Hence, it is no surprise that “American” cars are merely American shells slapped over a collection of foreign-made parts. Even an “American” product like the Boeing 787 is 90% foreign made. Recognizing only one of the many necessary goods of a firm, the corporation is converted from a protector of our industrial base into its destroyer, so that today we are a nation that makes far less than we consume, and will soon be forced to adjust our consumption to our means.

Friedman also redefined “free market” to mean “unregulated.” But this is nonsense, since markets are social institutions which are made by rules. For example, when Jay Gould decided to monopolize the building materials market in New York, he forbade his railroads to carry products from any competing company. As the “owner” of the railroads, he was “free” to do so, but did this make a free market? Clearly not. Only the imposition of the Common Carrier rule on the railroads freed the market from Gould’s personal control. Without proper rules, the “invisible hand” becomes an invisible fist, crushing all opponents. All social interactions are rule-bound. The only interesting question is whether the rules will be written by force or by reason.

Lynn also documents how the new feudalism makes the economy more vulnerable and fragile, as concentrated production introduces multiple choke-points, and small failures shut down whole industries. Indeed, a failure at one or a few factories can poison a whole nation. We are seeing an example of this in the 380-million egg recall. But the real destruction is political and social. As corporate “persons” gain more rights, real persons are effectively disenfranchised. Our politics degenerate into debates over trivialities, with passion over an issue inversely proportional to its importance.

Calling it “neo-feudalism” is unfair, to feudalism. At its best, that was a system of mutual rights and obligations which ensured a decent standard for all. The quasi-feudalism of the New Deal demanded a certain degree of servility, but also some fixed rights. The neo-feudalism is more like serfdom with declining opportunities and increasing debts for all, but especially for the young. The neo-feudalists are willing to promise better opportunities, but only to the degree it would not interfere with their wealth and their control. But they can no longer deliver what they promise, because they have been beaten at their own game by the Chinese and the Russians, and have become subordinated to foreign masters. And the rest of us along with them. The Chinese have set up a parallel trading system, and there is little anybody in the WTO or the West can do about it. After all, there is a limit to the quarrels we can pick with the people who hold the mortgage on our house and who lend us $2 billion/day to keep they whole thing going, at least for a little while longer.

This is an interesting and important book. I had not really intended to read it, since I thought I was generally familiar with the thesis. But Barry Lynn has done a careful job of research and thoughtful job of working out the implications. It is nothing less than the mechanics of Belloc’s Servile State. But Belloc thought such a state would at least be stable; it is not. We will soon, and very soon, be required to rebuild the social order. It will be of great use to understand how we get here, and Lynn goes a long way toward sorting that out.

New Castle, KY. What makes a community?  What holds a community together?  I know of some planned communities built in our area that seem to try to replicate what I was lucky enough to grow up with in Henry County.  It is ironic that the economy and culture we live in makes it almost impossible for small towns, small businesses, and small farms to survive, then then spends huge amounts of money trying to replicate what has been lost.  Or to convince the public that the entities that have run the small things out of existence are actually just as good or even just the same as what is gone.

I didn’t have to think much about community when I was young because I lived in one.  When Chuck and I got married in 1981, Henry County was not the self-sufficient place my parents and grandparents remembered, but it was a place where you could get what you needed. There was a good grocery store in every little town. There were hardware stores and clothing stores.  Every town had a good mechanic.  There were still soda fountains in drugstores and good little restaurants.  We had healthy civic organizations, emergency squads and fire departments.  These were run by volunteers, and the volunteers came from every part of our county’s life.

When I came back home in 1981, churches were still the main social centers for the county.  Services were held on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday nights.  I’ve known two churches well in my life, both in Henry County and both Baptist.  (“Moderate Baptist” we would say now, because of their open communion and ordination of women.)  I can speak with some authority about those churches, but I am guessing when I say that they were representative of other churches in our county in the diversity of beliefs held by the people of the congregation.  We shared Christian beliefs, but we differed in many other ways, certainly economic status and politics.  I’ve watched one of those churches struggle to maintain enough membership to continue, and the other implode.  Why did political and social differences, in just a few years, become more than could be tolerated?

I believe the change is agricultural, and is due to the loss of the tobacco program.  My father says it this way: “Our nationality was more or less American.  Our religion more or less Christian.  But our culture was largely determined by tobacco.  It was our staple crop, the cornerstone of our economy.  Because of “the program”–the federal regulations that limited production in order to control price—the tobacco market was the only market in which the farmer was dependably not a victim.  Though we practiced a diversified way of farming, our farming focused on tobacco.  The rhythm of our farming year, as of our financial year, was set by the annual drama of tobacco.”  I’m not defending tobacco; I’m saying that while we had the tobacco program we had a community-supporting economy.

In Kentucky, from the formation of the tobacco program in the early 40’s, every farm had a tobacco base.  This is the reason Kentucky is still dotted with small farms.  Tobacco farmers were not tobacco specialists. Tobacco was part of a diversified farm.  When Chuck and I started farming, besides raising tobacco we ran a dairy and raised hay, crops and a garden for ourselves.

Tobacco mattered to everyone, to everyone we went to church with, the business people who sold supplies to farmers, the bankers who loaned money to farmers, and on and on.  My point, finally, is language.  We spoke the same language.  We lived by the same work cycle.  Rural areas are suffering in almost every way, but to use again the example of the churches, I believe that we probably always were a congregation of people with very different views on a lot of things, but we shared enough essential things that those differences didn’t matter.  Now they do.

I am afraid that I don’t have much faith in “planned” communities.  Yet I don’t want to live without a community of people who honor the same things and understand our mutual need; who speak the same language.

When I begin to worry that too much has been lost, I look around for what is working.  That brings me to two beautiful farms just outside of Wheatley, in Owen County, Kentucky.  Teresa Biagi and Raphe Ellis own and run Hazelfield Farm.  They started with a fairly traditional tobacco farm that has changed over the years to a flower and vegetable farm.

Teresa grew up in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and Raphe in Owen County.  Both worked in tobacco growing up.  They bought Hazelfield Farm partly because of its large tobacco base.  (The base was what a banker would look at to make sure payments could be made.)  In the 80’s and 90’s quotas were cut a couple of times to keep supply and demand in check.  Most farmers leased other farm owners’ tobacco base to make up the loss.  Teresa used some of the tobacco ground to plant sunflowers, and so began what is today a thriving multigenerational family business.

After two years of taking flowers to markets, Teresa and Raphe added vegetables.  Raphe was able to give up carpentry and work full-time on the farm.  Teresa tends to the flowers and Raphe, the vegetables.

When the farm next door to them went up for sale, Teresa and Raphe bought it and soon Teresa’s daughter, Esmee, the child that Teresa thought would live in New York City, decided to move to it.  Esmee and her husband, Todd, now own it.  Both households are Hazelfield Farm.  But each takes care of its own business.  Esmee and Todd run a CSA and take vegetables to farmers’ markets.  Teresa and Raphe raise vegetables and flowers for markets, weddings, and parties. (She did my own daughter Katie’s wedding recently.)  Teresa’s younger daughter, Seyward, who is married and a teacher in the Owen County schools, goes to markets for her mother in the summer.

It is hard for me to image a writer good enough to describe and do justice to these farms and the people who run them.  Both farms are hilly.  The top of the ridge they live on is used for their annual crops.  The hillsides are used for perennial flowers and kept in grass for livestock.  There are fruit trees.  These places are abundant.  I know from experience how hard the work is, and the kind of stress this family has to deal with.  But you will find a kind of peace that transcends such difficulties when you spend time with people who are doing what they love and what they are good at, and know it.  I asked Teresa why this has worked out so well for them and she replied, “I love flowers and Raphe loves vegetables.”  What Teresa and Raphe have accomplished because of their great good sense and their willingness to be content is hopeful.  Their language is hopeful and would be recognizable to any tobacco farmer of the last hundred years.  But now they are talking about food.

I believe that community is based on real need, not just pleasant social occasions.  People need food, and more and more people know that they need local food and the farmers who raise it.  When cities invite the people of Hazelfield Farm to their markets, support them, and are grateful to them–when all the participants in this economic exchange understand all that is involved, they begin to speak the same language, and community has a chance.

1) An offhanded scoff at those who think “that the federal government has only those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution” (file under–what happened to the 10th Amendment?);

2) The claim that opposing “[federal] unemployment insurance, the [federal] minimum wage, [and] the federal highway system” are “political gaffes” spelling political death for any who fall into them;

3) The claim that gestures toward political violence are “far from reflecting the spirit of the Founders” (with a citation to the putting down of the Whiskey Rebellion … Lexington and Concord don’t qualify for consideration apparently);

4) Suggesting that the decentralist political philosophy so caricatured and dismissed by Gerson has no history as an “intellectual argument … conducted for years in serious books and journals” but rather was born out of a collection of Sarah Palin tweets;

5) And concluding with this claim: “Tea Party populism is just as clearly incompatible with some conservative and Republican beliefs. It is at odds with Abraham Lincoln’s inclusive tone and his conviction that government policies could empower individuals. It is inconsistent with religious teaching on government’s responsibility to seek the common good and to care for the weak. It does not reflect a Burkean suspicion of radical social change.  The Democratic political nightmare is now obvious and overwhelming. The Republican challenge is different: building a majority on an unstable, slightly cracked foundation.”

It is fun to see liberal centrists like Gerson scramble amid the ruins to admonish the GOP towards “responsible leadership” in the wake of the disastrous regime of “responsible leadership” under which we have suffered for many years.

Though the final tally may not be known for days, thanks to thousands of absentee ballots waiting to be counted, Miller is confident that he can pull off the upset. “The response to our campaign really exploded this past week,” Miller said in an interview with National Review Online. “We benefited from an incredible wave of support. Alaskans tend to put stuff off until the last minute. In the past few days, they got educated.”

Miller, a self-described “constitutional conservative,” was boosted by a last-minute money blitz from the Tea Party Express, which reportedly spent over $550,000 on the race. Abortion may have also played a role in generating turnout. On Tuesday’s ballot there was a measure requiring parental notification for women 17 and younger seeking an abortion. The proposal, Ballot Measure 2, passed with 55 percent of the vote. Miller was endorsed by Alaska Right to Life.

Miller also received high-profile endorsements from Mike Huckabee and, most notably, Sarah Palin, who recorded a robo-call for Miller in the campaign’s final days. Palin’s support, he says, was “pivotal.”  …

Miller, along with Senate hopefuls Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada, hopes to be part of a new conservative nucleus in the upper chamber.

Which state will be next?

Rock Island, IL

As the mercenaries in higher education all across the country prepare to spend another year lying to people whose lending institutions have paid them to tell the truth, and as the country itself moves further and further into the comfort of its favorite delusion (a point-one per cent increase in jobs for the first 72 minutes of the month of September!), I search in vain for an adequate image to represent the great American experiment that, it seems to me, is about to blow up and burn the whole red white & blue laboratory down.

Two, however, present themselves. One, which I think about often, is of the man who wakes at his usual hour, takes his coffee and sports page according to his custom, and has no idea that this day is his last, that today he will be at his desk or on a ladder or in the hen house collecting eggs, and all of a sudden the arteries in his neck will bulge like swelling ropes, his eyes will focus, then go blank, and then he’ll fall over red-faced and dead, the victim of a massive myocardial infarction.

The other, which I can’t quite refine to my satisfaction, is of a traveler of some sort—the occupant of a car, or the passenger in a train checking his phone messages—neither of whom knows what’s around the bend.

And then it’s over. The road disappears right out from under the car, or the train simply plunges off the track at a bridge that has just now collapsed. So ends a life. So ends civilization as we know it.

And of course there’s no do-over for either of these travelers. No judge will hear their appeals. No ref will blow the whistle and grant either one of them a time-out. They’re on their way to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Perhaps an instant has made all the difference: “Yes, thanks. I’ll be grateful for the lift,” says the one, or, “Might as well catch this earlier train as risk being late for the meeting,” says the other–variations, both, on our collective decision to invest in the infrastructure of suburbia, which in turn locked us in to the massive amounts of energy needed to run it. And so the fatal choice has been made. You can imagine the short-lived surprise of the woman riding in the car, or of the engineer, or of the rail passenger. “What the …?” And then the end comes.

Images, perhaps, of what we’re in for collectively, though as I said I feel as though I search in vain. I don’t quite have the confidence of the trampy woman at 1-900-ASK-STELA.

Nor am I optimistic, though I’m hoping for a moderately “soft landing” from the heights of cheap oil—and by that I mean a scenario as grim as they come: failed landing gear on a burning but fully-loaded aircraft rapidly approaching a foamed but too-distant runway, emergency vehicles stalled near, but not quite on, the site, and a 300-pound hysterical woman in the seat next to me sweating enough to grow rice.

Because, frankly (and to switch modes of transport), I think we’re coming ’round the mountain only to find a gorge formerly spanned by a bridge the girders of which have just now snapped. And guess what. It turns out that no IQ is high enough to avert the mischief wrought by high speeds and high-energy inputs.

For are not the most educated people in America the fastest squanderers of ancient sunlight? And doesn’t this fact portend the kind of unforeseen trouble best illustrated by something like high-speed travel around blind curves?

And, more to the point, haven’t we all abandoned the difficult pilgrimage that tradition gave us for the easy tourism that oil promised us?

I’d like to think there’s an image that does a better job of flattering our capacity to avert disaster, as for example the person on a given perch who has sufficient distance to notice an assassin making his way through a carnival crowd—but also sufficient proximity either to forestall the assassin or warn the victim.

But that, I’m afraid, is an image that is reserved in real time for the nutcase or madman upon whom only hindsight can bestow the name of prophet or visionary. And, at any rate, only a man smarter than us or sufficiently paranoid to begin with could believe the stranger who says to him that an assassin is making his way through the carnival crowd. Ezekiel—nay, Jeremiah himself—could not make us sit up and pay attention to the trouble that’s coming our way.

I make these tentative, I dare say almost furtive, remarks upon re-reading a book written by someone who on at least one occasion has been called a “Malthusian hack” here (even though the book’s author positions himself between the “cornucopians” on the one hand and the “‘die-off’ crowd” on the other). I say “tentative” because I never find it particularly comfortable to operate outside the main run of things, though that is where I seem to spend most of my time.

And I spend most of my time there because I also find it difficult to operate inside the main run of things, which is why I must say it’s hard not to credit Jim Kunstler for asking a pretty good question: “How could such a catastrophe [as., e.g., instability of world markets and “previously unimaginable austerity” after peak oil] be so close at hand[,] and civilized, educated people in free countries with free news media and transparent institutions be so uninformed about it?”

That, of course, is from The Long Emergency, which, as anyone who has read it knows, is a book that challenges what is “absolutely normative” about our current economic, social, and political arrangements and reminds us that only in an elaborate made-for-adults fairy tale can anyone believe that markets and technology will rescue us from the coming oil scarcity, to say nothing of the resource wars that, far from being likely, are inevitable.

But all across this Great Land Of Ours the denizens of the ivory towers will parrot the permitted technocratic bullshit and turn resolutely away from the evidence everywhere suggesting that, because there are natural limits just around the bend, hitting the brakes would be a really good idea.

And all kinds of unsuspecting undergraduates will pay exorbitant amounts of money to follow their lead.

O blindness to the future kindly given! as Pope said. And perhaps he was right. But does that mean we have to be pigheaded as well?

Claremont, CA

The title of Emma Lazarus’ famous ode to the Statue of Liberty is “The New Colossus,” a fact I remembered last week when I passed the newer – and grimmer – colossus that is Liberty State Park.

Liberty State Park is the New Jersey-based launching point for trips to two of the nation’s most iconic sites: Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The park was opened as part of the 1976 bicentennial celebration, and its views of what have been called the “most universal symbols of political freedom and democracy” have meant that all sorts of patriotic events take place on its grounds. Ronald Reagan formally began his first presidential campaign with a speech at Liberty State Park; the singer Toby Keith led a major support-the-military rally here when the U.S. began sending troops to Afghanistan; and so on.

Tourists are supposed to come to Liberty State Park, look across the water to Ellis and Liberty Islands, and think, “This is what America is all about.”

They might, for a fuller picture of our national character, cast their eyes down, to the ground on which they stand. Liberty State Park is built on a landfill, created by the Central Railroad of New Jersey to plug up what was once a large tidal bay known for its vast quantities of marine life. The location is haunted by the ghosts of a devastated ecosystem, existing as one more testament to the disregard for nature that has been an undeniable part of our national history.

But if tourists really really want to see what the current state of the union is all about, they need to consider my favorite part of Liberty State Park, which is the fact that it recently has been bisected – rent in two – by the Liberty National Golf Course.

Liberty National Golf Course, for those who have not yet been asked to play there, is the most expensive golf course ever built. It opened in 2006, having cost an estimated $250 million to create, and is the centerpiece of the Liberty National Golf Club. Membership in the club is by invitation only, and those lucky few who are invited may join for the low, low “initiation fee” of $500,000. The course’s website reassures would-be members that the course is easy to reach … because there are five landing strips for private jets nearby.

Some have justified Liberty National’s existence by saying that if it hadn’t been built, the site “would still be a toxic waste dump rotting on the banks of the Hudson River.” Because, I guess, the only way to fix something broken is to sell it off to the highest bidder, who will then paint it pretty colors and tell other people that if they want to look at it, they have to pay half a million dollars.

(I’m not sure how much legitimate environmental cleanup went into the construction of Liberty National, although I am sure that golf courses themselves tend to be environmentally dubious propositions, albeit environmentally dubious propositions that are aesthetically pleasing.)

Indeed, people who have had occasion to visit Liberty National Golf Course report that it is very pretty. I’m sure it is, what with “the huddled masses” and “the tempest-tost” kept a safe distance away from the “state of the art heliport.” And isn’t that what America is all about?

In what is undoubtedly its most evocative lines, the Liberty National Golf Club website brags that when you play golf there, “Lady Liberty is the target on several approach shots.”

That’s right.

When you – and let me be clear that I don’t really mean you, since I don’t expect you are reading this from the comfort of your gold-plated private jet – are playing your half-a-million-dollar round, you’re supposed to imagine bashing the Statue of Liberty in the face with your golf ball. On several approach shots, over and over again.

Sorry, Lady Liberty. There’s a Newer Colossus in town.

The alternative is to decentralize food production. For example, my wife and I buy eggs from a man down the road. He keeps fifty or so hens and supplements his income with a little egg business. Once every week or so, we stop by his house and knock on the door. He invites us in where we chat for a minute or two while he gets a dozen fresh eggs from the refrigerator. He loves to talk about his chickens and I’m happy to listen. He takes great delight in his birds and cares well for them–I see them each time I pull into his driveway. I trust him. And I trust that the eggs we buy from him are safe. Our personal relationship, born of proximity, makes government regulations unnecessary. If I ever concluded that he was mistreating his chickens or creating an unsafe environment for the production of eggs, I could, armed with that knowledge, find another source of eggs.

Furthermore, if it ever happened that his eggs were contaminated with salmonella, the “outbreak” would be easy to contain. Only a few families would be effected. No CDC would be needed to trace the eggs through a massive industrial system. In short, the threat would be contained because the production is of an easily managed scale.

A decentralized food system or a centralized regulatory system backed by the power of the state.  These seem to be the two options.

Elections held in Australia this weekend suggest dramatic gains for the conservative “Coalition” of the Liberal and National parties…. if not enough to form the government, at least enough to deny the Labour Party a majority.

Mostly unknown in the USA is the continuting influence of Distributist ideas on the Coalition Parties, a legacy of one of the great men of the 20th Century, the late B.A. (“Bob”) Santamaria. A “rural organizer” for the Catholic Church of Australia in the late 1930s, he was inspired by Belloc and Chesterton. During the next two decades, he successfull faced down Communist infiltration of Australia’s labor unions, through a Christian alternative called ”The Movement.” He then went on to found The Independent Labour Party, a “third party” effort that kept a radicalized Labour Party out of office for over a decade. Its domestic agenda was a  “model” distributist progam.  He subsequently created The National Civic Council and the Australian Family Association, both of which remain influential players in Australian politics.

The speech which follows was delivered by yours truly to a large audience celebrating National Marriage Day in Sydney, Australia, on Thursday, August 12, 2010. The event memorialized a political agreement several years ago, by Left and Right, to fix a quite conventional definition of marriage in Australian Federal Law. Chief sponsors for the dinner were The National Civic Council and the Austrlain Family Association, joined by another dozen groups. Attendees included Cardinal Archbishop Pell, of Sydney, this Lutheran’s candidate for the next Papal vacancy.

—

In my part of the United States, the upper Midwest, one finds many descendants of immigrants from Sweden.  “Ole and Lena” are a mythical Swedish-American couple, probably residing somewhere in Minnesota, and notable for their remarkably dysfunctional marriage.  One story goes like this:

Ole and Lena had grown old, and one day Ole became very sick.  Eventually, he was confined to his upstairs bedroom, barely conscious, bedridden, and growing ever weaker.  After several weeks of this, the Doctor visits and tells Lena:  ‘Vell, Ole’s just about a goner.  I don’t tink he’ll survive the night.’

So Lena, being a practical woman, decides she had better start preparing for all the guests who would be coming to Ole’s funeral.  She begins to bake, starting with loaves of limpa, a Swedish sweet rye bread.  The pleasant smell of baking bread is soon wafting through the house.

Suddenly, upstairs, Ole’s nose twitches and his eyes bolt open.  “Limpa!” he says.  He jerks up into a sitting position, swings his legs around, and climbs out of bed.  It’s like a miracle!  Half walking, half stumbling, he crosses the room, enters the hallway, and starts working his way down the stairs.  “Limpa!” he says again.

He reaches the ground floor, stumbles across the kitchen, and pulls himself into a chair by a table where a loaf of freshly sliced bread sits.  He reaches over to take a slice.

“Stop that Ole!” shouts Lena, as she whaps his hand with her spatula.  “That limpa bread is for after the funeral.”

We can still laugh at Ole and Lena, even here in Sydney, Australia, because they are now out of time, characters from an earlier era of Swedish immigration into America.  Their “ideal type,” we might say, no longer exists.

More importantly, their dysfunctional marriage also belongs to another era.  Several generations ago, when there were real “Oles and Lenas,” divorce would have been rare in their community.  For better and worse, persons stayed in unhappy or troubled marriages, perhaps “for the sake of the children”; perhaps for religious reasons.

Successful jokes usually involve making fun of institutions that are strong and stable.  The “marriage joke,” a staple of comedians during the 1950’s and 1960’s, seems to be fading in our time.  Symbolically, Rodney Dangerfield, perhaps the last American master of the marriage joke, died last year.

Australia is, in many ways, a blessed country.  One recent blessing that you received was the 2004 agreement between your political leadership, left and right, to fix a solid definition of marriage within your nation’s Federal law, as involving [quote] “the union of a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.”  As a result, it seems, Australia has avoided the most contentious aspects of the “same-sex marriage” debate, an issue very much at “high boil” across the United States (as testified to by events last week in California).

All the same, Australia has not been immune from other legal changes over the last several decades, which taken together have weakened marriage as an institution.  These include:

• The elimination of legal distinctions between births in- and out-of-wedlock;
• Abortion laws that ignore the claims of the husband/father;
• The acceptance of cohabitation as a legal status, providing some of the benefits of marriage without the corresponding duties;
• The elimination of “fault” in divorce proceedings, which has had the effect of rewarding infidelity while ― in practice ― ending the community’s interest in marriage preservation;
• And the broad leveling of gender roles specific to marriage and the rearing of children, which undercut in turn historic “family wage” regimes; while these systems were not perfect, they did commonly reinforce the best interests of children.

And so, in the year 2010, we in the Western world are left with a “social-biological” construct, no longer an “institution” admired by all, one that is ― in truth ― battered and bruised, and in some respects but a shadow of its former legal and cultural self.  It is important to remember that most of this change came before “same sex marriage” was an issue.

More oddly, for the first time in human history, natural marriage has to justify itself in democratic countries before the court of public opinion.  What had been obvious to most prior human societies, over the centuries and around the globe, is now “an issue.”  The main reason for this, I think, is the modern superstition that the past has nothing to teach us:  the assumption that our ancestors were all moral barbarians, ethical troglodytes full of prejudice and mainly devoted to attacks on human dignity and human differences.  This might be called the arrogance of Presentism.  For the same reason, religions resting on inherited dogma stand as particularly suspect.

There’s an old comment about truth claims:  in the 17th Century, any political leader seeking to support an opinion would quote Holy Scripture; in the 18th Century, he would quote Shakespeare; in the 19th Century, perhaps a philosopher such as Kant, Hegel, or Emerson; but in the 20th Century, he would quote a sociologist.  I am not sure if this is progress.  In any case, this preference for sociology still seems alive and well.

Three years ago, when several same-sex couples sued Polk County, Iowa (the place where I was born and grew up), arguing that the state of Iowa’s marriage law discriminated against them, county officials asked me to serve as an expert witness in court.  My task was to explain why it was rational for the State of Iowa to restrict legal marriage to opposite-sex couples, of proper age.  As an historian, I would explain why most human societies have understood the virtues of natural marriage and have given to such marriage extra-ordinary support and attention.  I filed an appropriate “Summary Report of my Relevant Opinions,” and went through a day-long deposition by opposing attorneys for the Lambda Legal Defense Association.  (As an aside, if you’ve never been deposed as a witness, I can report that it can be a grueling process.  For a writer, though, it’s actually a great thrill:  Lambda’s team of lawyers had clearly and carefully read everything I had ever written.  And while I knew they were looking solely for inconsistencies, contradictions, and errors, which they could use to attack my so-called “expertise,” such grand acts of reading are that of which authors dream!)

Back to the main story-line.  When the trial judge issued his bench ruling on the case the next year, he dismissed my testimony as irrelevant:  he said that history ― the record of human triumphs and tragedies, follies and successes ― history had nothing to teach the law about the issue of “same sex” marriage; only “number crunching” sociology would be allowed as evidence.  Partly for this reason, the judge in question found in favor of the plaintiffs.  The Iowa Supreme Court subsequently upheld the judge’s ruling, and my home state ― not so long ago a bastion of rural conservatism ― became the fifth American state to embrace same-sex marriage.

Actually, the judge was wrong here, in more than one sense.  Appealing to social science, he concluded that the evidence favored same-sex marriage.  The opposite is actually true.  So, in that judge’s somewhat tedious spirit, foreswearing history and embracing social science, I want to address the question at hand:  “Why Australia Needs a Renewed Culture of Natural Marriage.”

First, though, allow me to explain what I mean by “natural marriage.”  Actually, I simply agree here with Evan Wolfson, the acknowledge leader of the same-sex marriage movement in America, that there is something “natural” about the intimate relationship of a man a woman.  As Wolfson put it in his book, Why Marriage Matters:

At first glance, the “basic biology” argument seems to make some sense.  After all, it doesn’t take more than a fourth-grade health class education to know that men’s and women’s bodies in some sense “complement” each other “and that when a man and a woman come “together as one flesh” it often leads to procreation. (Why Marriage Matters, 2004).

Yes, indeed, albeit ― in my case ― this is true on the ‘second’ and ‘third’ glance, as well.

So:  First and foremost, Australia needs a culture of natural marriage for the good of the children. Thousands of recent research projects in the fields of sociology, psychology, anthropology, and medicine all testify to one truth:  children predictably do best when they are born into a married-couple home and raised by their two natural parents.  This might be the most unassailable truth in all social science.  Why?  According to a recent American Academy of Pediatrics Panel, “Marriage is beneficial in many ways” because people “behave differently when they are married.  They have healthier lifestyles, eat better, and mother each others health.”  Looking at the effects on children, the Panel stressed that this advantage is not found in step family households nor in households headed by unmarried cohabitating parents.  (Pediatrics, 2003)  Another research team found that the advantages given to children by intact marriages extend beyond the individual child:  the existence of such marriages also predicts the overall health of a school and a neighborhood → that is, intact families are essential for creating “a social world [that] is ordered in ways that generally favor young persons.”  (that from the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 2004)

This advantage of the natural parent, marriage-based home holds up when compared to sole-parent, step-parent, same-sex, cohabitating, or communal households.  Sometimes the advantage is extraordinary.  Regarding child sexual abuse, for example, data from Canada showed that preschool-age children living with their natural parents are forty times less likely to become abuse victims than are those children living in alternative arrangements.  (Ethology and Sociobiology, 1985)

The children from such homes are ― on balance ― also much healthier, in both mind and body, than those growing up in any other setting.  They earn higher marks in school; indeed, family structure is superior to all other competing theoretical explanations for differences in child achievement.  (Journal of Early Adolescence, 2000; Social Problems, 2000)

Over two hundred years ago, the French statesman Louis de Bonald ― also sometimes called the first social scientist ― explained why the state had a vital interest in each new marriage.  As he wrote in his 1801 book, On Divorce:

“Political power only intervenes in the spouse’s contract of union because it represents the unborn child, which is the sole object of marriage, and because it accepts the commitment made by the spouses … under its guarantee to bring that child into being [and to raise it well].”

Nothing of significance has changed since:  natural marriage is for the good of the children, which every healthy government need acknowledge.

The second reason Australia needs a renewed culture of natural marriage is because it is good for adults.

• Natural marriage gives life. Researchers from Princeton University report that married men and women live longer ― on average ― than unmarried peers (be they never-married, divorced, or widowed).  (Demography, 1990)  Indeed, marital status is the most consistent predictor of longevity among women.  As the title of an article on women’s health, appearing in Social Biology, has put it:  “Perils of Single Life and the Benefits of Marriage” [1987].
• Natural marriage gives health. A French study found that married mothers with children at home enjoyed significant improvement in their health.  (Social Science and Medicine, 2000)  Even in Sweden, where lone mothers receive generous welfare benefits, they experience important health disadvantages when compared to married mothers (Social Science and Medicine, 2000).  Indeed, single or lone mothers are three times more likely to have experienced “a major depressive disorder.”  (Journal of Marriage and Family, 1997)
• Natural marriage creates greater wealth. This wealth-generating effect of wedlock crosses racial and gender lines.  As one study put it, “the power of marriage to deliver affluence for women is particularly strong.”  Married individuals, compared to the unmarried, gain nearly three times as much wealth over their lifetimes.  (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003)  Natural marriage accomplishes this because “it provides institutionalized protection, which generates economies of scale, task specialization, … access to work-related fringe benefits, … broader social networks and higher savings rates.” (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2002)
• And natural marriage brings happiness.  Research shows that the optimal state of mental health, labeled “flourishing,” is more prevalent among the married than the unmarried, be the latter widowed, separated, divorced, or never-married.  “Deep depression” is rarest among the married.  (Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 2002)  A survey of seventeen nations found married adults reporting significantly higher levels of personal happiness than their unmarried peers.  Contrary to feminist claims that wedlock benefits only men, the study showed that “marriage protects females just as much from unhappiness as it protects males.”  (Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1998)

The third reason that Australia needs a renewed culture of marriage is because it is good for the commonwealth, or the state.

The children of natural marriage are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol or to enter the juvenile justice system.  This means in turn that they are much less likely to become expenses for the state, be it through rehabilitation programs or as prisoners.

To the contrary, the children issuing from natural marriage are more likely to do well in school, earn university degrees, be gainfully employed, and ―in consequence ― become taxpayers (rather than wards of the state).

Young mothers who are married are much less likely to require means-tested welfare benefits than their never-married or divorced counterparts.  As with their children, they are a net plus, a fiscal boost, for all levels of government.

As noted earlier, married adults are ― on average ― much wealthier than the unmarried and enjoy significantly higher lifetime earnings.  They, too, represent a gain ― rather than a net loss ― for governments at all levels, by providing a reliable tax revenue stream.

Well, I think you get the point.  The children and the adults found in homes built on natural marriage are far more likely to be or become responsible citizens, wealth creators, and taxpayers; those found in other arrangements are ― to varying degrees ― more likely to be or become dependents on government, and a net drain on the public treasury.  For this reason alone, the state has a compelling interest in raising to the maximum the number of children born into and growing up within natural parent, married couple homes.

However, there is another ― and more profound ― reason for seeking to renew a culture of natural marriage.  Briefly put, marriage ― as conventionally understood ― is a bulwark of liberty.  Here ― despite the bigotry of Iowa judges against the past ― I revert to history.  The telling reality is that every modern totalitarian movement ― every enemy of a free society ― has moved early and aggressively to disrupt or destroy the institution of natural marriage.

This began in the French Revolution, where the Jacobins first swept away the legal preference shown to births within marriage and then sought to weaken the marital bond through easy, unilateral divorce.

The Communists, who seized power in Russia through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, immediately targeted marriage and the family for extinction.  As the Communist advocate Alexandra Kollontai explained at the time:  “the old type of family has had its day….  [T]he task of bringing up the children … is passing more and more into the hands of the collective.”  This occurred, she said, so that the child might “grow up a conscious communist who recognizes the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective.”  Divorce could also now “be obtained at the [simple] request of either partner in a marriage”; all distinctions between cohabitation and marriage were abolished.

The National Socialists of Germany also worked to destroy the autonomous natural family.  As historian Claudia Koonz explains in her fine book, Mothers in the Fatherland:

“Far from honoring the family, …. Nazi policy aimed at eroding family ties among victims and its own “Aryan” followers.  In both cases, the goal was the same:  to break down individual identity and to render people susceptible to whatever plans Hitler announced:  eugenic breeding schemes for the chosen “Aryans” and genocide for the selected.”

In Communist China during the late 1950’s, authorities forced 90 percent of rural Chinese households into huge communes.  Relative to food, they also outlawed family gardens, family kitchens, and the family meal. The family woks were melted down; the law forbade home cooking; all must eat in communal halls.  The result was a wave of gluttony, followed by mass famine:  30 million deaths through starvation and an estimated 33 million lost or postponed births:  “the greatest politically inspired disaster in human history,” according to the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change (1997).

Even in the land of Sweden, during the so-called “Red” phase of Social Democratic rule in the 1970’s, the primary ideological target was natural marriage.  Policy there aimed in particular at eliminating the mother-at-home and the provider-role long held by husbands and fathers.  To achieve full equality, the socialists held that all citizens ― adult men and women as well as children ― must be made equally dependent on the welfare state.  Feminist Historian Yvonne Hirdman explains the result:

“New ideas of gender replaced old-fashioned ideas about the couple.  We witness [here] the birth of the androgynous [or ‘sexless’] individual (and I speak about the explicit ideal) and the death of the provider and his housewife.”  (The Importance of Gender in the Swedish Labor Movement, Or:  A Swedish Dilemma, 2002)

Why this common hostility by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes to natural marriage?  The great English journalist G.K. Chesterton explains the reason in his provocative 1920 pamphlet, The Superstition of Divorce:  He writes:

The ideal for which [marriage] stands in the state is liberty.  It stands for liberty for the very simple reason… [that] it is the only…institution that is at once necessary and voluntary. It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state….  This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive the bad government.

Or, as Chesterton put it in his 1910 book, What’s Wrong with the World:

It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State….The State has no tool delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in between them.  The man and the woman are one flesh ― yes, even when they are not one spirit.  Man is a quadruped.

Chesterton, as usual for him, was an optimist about the future of marriage.  In the end, he held, the totalitarians ― the social engineers ― would always retreat before the inherent strength of the four-legged creature formed by natural marriage.  And so it has been in the past:  in the end, the French Revolutionaries failed; so did the Communists in Russia: so did the German National Socialists; and so did the Maoists in China.  In their time, each seemed to be unstoppable; each appeared to represent the inevitable future.  Yet in every case, they collapsed or retreated, because they violated human nature.

Those who seek to deconstruct marriage today are, it is true, more clever than their predecessors.  Using what might be called “the Swedish model,” their propaganda machine is much more effective.  Their promises are more seductive.  And they sometimes seem unstoppable.  However, I am confident that they too will fail, and for the same reason:  they misunderstand the nature of the human being.

So go forward with confidence as you work to rebuild in Australia a culture of natural marriage.  Human nature, innate human longings, human biology, and human history are all on your side.

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This piece was originally given as an address for the National Marriage Day Dinner at the York Conference Center in Sydney, Australia on August 13, 2010.