Civility

People here talk about the weather a lot.

You hear it everywhere—amongst the people gathered for coffee at the Dairy Queen, at the hardware store, at church, in the average phone conversation. The other day, as my wife and I were taking our son for a stroller ride around town, we passed a powerwalking middle-aged lady who, after the customary and sufficient exchange of “Hi”s, for some reason felt it necessary to call back to us over her shoulder from a significant distance back down the sidewalk to give her opinion of the fine weather.

It used to annoy me to no end, how people would comment on the weather that we could all see clearly enough without the play-by-play commentary. Then one day I realized that this is a farming-dependent region, and nearly everyone, no matter their current residence or means of making a living, was separated from an agrarian lifestyle by only a generation or two at most; therefore, the weather was indeed an issue of concern socially, and as such was certainly worth talking about. These days, I don’t mind a discussion of the weather, unless its purpose is solely to have something safe to say to someone with whom we have little relationship. I guess I’ve always been a little contrary.

Talking about the weather is just one example of those social conventions which we variably call courtesy, etiquette, or politeness. I’ve heard many anthropologists and sociologists explain social politeness as the way we interact with strangers to keep from killing them (although my murderous tendencies are aroused more by the banal application of the superficialities of politeness than by its complete absence). These conventions are intended to create or, at the least, mimic civility.

We used to have civility, in the deepest sense of the word (citizenship, belonging, a sense of being a part of a place and a people, from the Latin civis, “citizen”), simply by needing one another and living in community. This was generally the way of things since the dawn of band-level societies until mass-migration, mass-production, and mass-media converged during the Industrial Age, culminating in the mid-twentieth century in creating a truly mass culture. The dominant modi of “culture” have moved from the local and specific to the widespread and general. We now experience the social necessity of politeness, since we lack so much in familiarity.

It was due to and during this convergence of mass influences that we began our shift from being members of functioning communities to being members of the general public. The meta-shifts of the late Industrial Age—from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, from agriculture to agribusiness, from competent self-sufficiency to wage-earning dependency, from multi-generationalism to the “nuclear family”—brought about a situation in which hundreds of millions of people globally changed their living situations to such an extent, separating themselves from others to such a degree, that individualism has become our basic social principle. And a society of individuals can be said to experience communion in little else than jointly consuming “public goods”—air, water, place, information.

In our individuality, and without the strictures of interdependent community, we have gradually absconded from our personal responsibilities and interests, relinquishing them to ever-distant political bodies and impersonal purveyors of goods. Disenchanted and dispossessed, we became targets—individuality and dependency are profitable concepts. Consumer culture was born, and savvy profit-seekers have supplied us with automobiles, personal computers and DVD players, MP3 players, earbuds and cell phones, all those things which so clearly illustrate our isolation from all those other individuals surrounding us.

Now, as a society, we live individually or as nuclear families, needing 1) only those companies which provide us goods or services to consume—those that grow, transport, process, package, and sell us our food; those that saw and mill or synthetically produce the materials from which we build and furnish our homes; those that produce our energy sources (at tremendously high cost monetarily, environmentally, and socially), transport them directly to our homes (by way of an ubiquitous, monstrously ugly, dangerous and bothersome web of power and gas lines), and sell them to us (at unbelievably low cost for what they help us achieve); those that grow and mill or synthetically produce the fabrics from which other companies fashion the products with which we clothe ourselves; those that sell us the ability to “communicate” with those other individuals with whom we still share some modicum of relationship; those that produce and/or provide our means of transportation in our exceedingly travel-dependent systems of land use and municipal zoning; those that pay us wages for doing often demeaning work so that we can hopefully afford to buy the services and products of all these other companies—and 2) the paternalistic, multifarious, often duplicitous and unquestionably inefficient and wasteful government programs and legislation intended to “help” us achieve our goals or “protect” us in achieving them.

Thankfully, many people live outside of this paradigm, and I am grateful for them, and I hope they are appropriately grateful for their good fortune. However, this situation is the common social and economic paradigm of our time in the “developed” world, and this paradigm is so structurally engrained that except in local neighborhoods, VERY small towns, and institutional and religious communes, we no longer need the people we pass on the streets every day, and so we must create social conventions which keep us from doing them harm for the purpose of self-advancement.

I see dissatisfaction with and a backlash against this condition brewing in North American culture today. These have been brewing since the “Back to the Land” movement of nearly four decades ago. Unfortunately, that movement (along with the Hippie counterculture that partially gave birth to it) was a reactionary one, and its influence was significant but small. I fear reactionary “movements”, for a reaction cannot exist except in reference to another thing; move away from that thing and the ideals which brought about the reaction can be ambiguated, forgotten, or preyed upon. What I hope to come of this dissatisfaction is not some new movement fashioned out of the philosophies of self which dominate our current social situation but a thoroughgoing rediscovery of the necessity and pleasure of life in meaningful relationship with others.

When we belong with and to one another, perhaps we will be able and willing to trade our pleasantries and politeness for civility and consideration.

Maybe even talking about the weather will become a truly worthwhile activity.

Great News!

According to this article, Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, believes that al-Qaida is no longer operating in Afghanistan.

Great! Mission accomplished, payback for 9/11 complete. So when are we bringing our boys home?

Wait, aren't we sending even more troops to Afghanistan?

Oh, yeah, that's right—we still haven't completed that pipeline to the Indian Ocean that we wanted in the region, and we haven't yet bound ourselves to India by invading Pakistan...ummm, I mean, "supporting" Pakistan's valiant offensives against the Taliban (you know, that little troublesome group we essentially created to help stave off the last invaders of Afghanistan, the Soviets), and we haven't found Osama bin Laden, and we haven't completed our nationbuilding exercises in the region (as pushed by the new pro-war "progressive" thinktank, the Center for a New American Security, from which Obama conscripted his Undersecretary of Defense).

We're gettin' in deep, people, and it ain't likely to get better anytime soon.

You know, I wonder what happened to all those anti-war protesters we used to have? Are they all at a conference or something? Since Obama passed himself off as the anti-war candidate last year, maybe they all quit once he was elected, expecting the Pax Americana to descend upon the earth. Or maybe they have all bought into the "wrong war" mantra of some so-called "progressives" in Congress. And I expect a few of them were just Bush-bashers and Republican-haters (which is fine, since both Bush and most recent Republican politicians deserve nearly every unkind thing one can think of to say about them, and I say that as a registered Republican and as someone who voted for Bush). But aren't there any anti-war protesters out there who are actually against war? Or is that kind of ideological consonance unattainable in our day by anyone who is not a Jain, Buddhist, Mennonite, Quaker, or Amish? (Luckily, there are a few decent anti-war people around—they just aren't the ones we heard screaming during the Bush years who now seem to have lost their voices—and they often have good things to say.)

OK, I suppose the only really great news here is that the good ol' U.S. of A. hasn't strayed from its course since 1917, when the war-mongering, Constitution-trampling "Progressive" Woodrow Wilson set us off on our enduring Imperial Quest to "make the world safe for democracy".

If you consider that a good thing.

Connections

I need connections. I need a place to be and to be a part of. Since I was 17 I’ve been somewhat of a drifter. I finished high school, moved out of my parents’ house, and set out on a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to make it on my own.

Growing up in King, North Carolina, never quite suited me. I dreamed of being other places, of being someone else. I remember hearing a song on the radio at my grandmother’s house when I was about 12 or 13; it said, “I’m gonna be somebody/One of these days I’m gonna break these chains/I’m gonna be somebody/You can bet your hard-earned dollar I will.” This was Travis Tritt’s “I’m Gonna Be Sombody”, one of his first singles. I didn’t know who Travis Tritt was at that time, but I knew I wanted to be like the guy in that song. Unfortunately, I thought that meant having to leave behind everything and everyone I knew, since what I knew didn't quite encourage being "somebody".

I first visited New York when I was 17. I loved the city and came to realize through that weeklong experience that there was a MUCH bigger world out there for me to get to know. Sometime around my 18th birthday I took a trip to Alaska as a graduation/birthday present to myself. This was too much—seeing the two extremes of the quintessential urban landscape and, a few months later, after I had had a little time to process the first experience, the closest thing to wilderness America had left to offer proved more than my small-town-North Carolina self could handle. I wanted out.

After a year of community college a couple counties over from where I grew up, I began to feel drawn to work in church ministry. A few months later I decided on a college—in Saskatchewan, Canada, of all places. Three years and a bit later, looking to fulfill the internship requirement for my ministry degree (at a different college in a different Canadian province), I decided to take a job in Casper, Wyoming, basing my choice on driving through western and north-central Wyoming in 1998 and the eastern half of the state, including Casper, in 1999. I arrived in Casper one fine day in late August, 2000, not having a clue as to where I was going to live, much less sleep that night. Thankfully, Dave Tenney, the kind fellow who had been called out to welcome me on behalf of the school I was to teach at (pardon me, at which I was to teach), happened to have a garage apartment for rent. His sweet little children were the first to introduce me to my new title: Mr. Calloway.

I worked at the school and at a church, fulfilling the requirements for three different internships during that year. I loved it—I was busy, I had my own life for the first time, I was important to a lot of people. I developed some of the deepest friendships of my life during that time. But, due to the combination of a couple bad experiences and the lack of maturity necessary to handle them well, I decided to leave my chosen home, taking the easy way out by blaming the decision on having finished my internships and my desire to finish my degree. A part of me regretted that decision for several years. A part of me still considers Casper my home.

I spent two years in Alberta, finished one degree and came within one assignment of finishing a second, drove back to Casper, spent six months there trying to work through my regrets, and then finally returned to North Carolina, penniless, with not a bit of direction for my life. So I decided to do what nearly all directionless people do—go to university. I thought I’d become a professional at some academic abstraction, finally become somebody, finally break those chains of indecision and regret. Well, a bit more than two years, two universities, $35,000 of student loan debt, and the failure of the most serious romantic relationship up to that point of my life later, at the age of 29, I moved back in with my parents, ostensibly to help care for my partially disabled dad, but in reality because I had nothing else left. Six months later I drove out to Montana for a job interview, and on a whim took a little jaunt back up to Saskatchewan. Thank God.

Over the years I got to know a lot of people and a lot of places, but I’m about as rootless as a store-bought onion. Sure, I have my favorite places scattered over the U.S. and western Canada—a little cove in a waterfall in North Carolina, the spot beside the Snake River at the base of the Tetons where I first heard coyotes sing, decaying pioneers’ cabins here and there, great little Indonesian restaurants in Calgary and New York, a krumholtzed five-foot-tall relic of a tree on Wolf Rock, a nearly redwood-sized 500-year-old tulip poplar tucked so far back into the mountains of Tennessee that it somehow survived the loggers’ saws, the glistening stream in Wyoming where I first flyfished, a muddy trickle of a spring in the Smoky Mountains that once quite possibly saved my life. And I know people scattered all around the world who have had profound influences on my life, with most of whom, however, I carry on little or no correspondence. I now have a beautiful wife and child to ground me somewhat, but what I lack is a deep and abiding relationship to A place and A community of people.

I have been reading Wendell Berry’s essay, “A Native Hill”, in which he looks at his own life in terms of the place in Kentucky where he grew up and to which he returned after he tired of his successful literary career in New York and other famous centers of magnificence. His relationship with that place and the people there show me what I do not have, what I never have had, but what I desperately want.

I think there’s something missing in most of us products of suburban life and modern transport. And I think that thing that’s missing has a lot to do with our general dissatisfaction with our circumstances here in the most wealthy region of the world, the erosion of our culture and decency, our rates of depression and suicide, our extreme individuality, escapist religious teachings, extractive consumer economy, and progressive destruction of the earth. I think most of us suffer from a fundamental sickness, and it comes on us because we never truly belong to a place. And if we never belong to a place, we cannot in any meaningful sense belong to its people—no wonder we escape into virtual online worlds, collect friends on Facebook, and absentmindedly chat on our cellphones nearly constantly. If we do not belong to any place or its community of people, we are all nothing but individuals passing one another every day, getting to pick and choose our relationships based upon how they benefit us, seldom being required to develop the humility necessary to see ourselves as small parts of a greater whole. This hubris of the self is one of the most devastating forces humanity can wield, and, unfortunately, our contemporary culture and its consumer economy are geared to create just that pathos in each one of us.

So how does the drifter find a home? How does he make a place his own and begin to belong to it rather than the other way around? How does the self-centered man be truly present with other self-centered people? How do individuals create genuine community where it does not exist, and how can we genuinely enter into it where it does? I’m not asking how we make friends—most of us are capable of that. But how do we create interconnectedness—healthy interdependence—in a world of individuals and an economy of consumers?