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.

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?

The Unsettling of America

A few days ago, I started reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Excellent book. Berry is a prophet for our time, calling into question a culture which can disconnect and insulate itself from every natural process and which encourages the division of every individual from the community of humanity. His principles and perspectives are exceptionally natural, practical and sensible, but that's what you'd expect from a farmer, and that's what he is.

If you find anything I have to say interesting or provocative then you would do well to read Wendell Berry - many of his perspectives seem like much more intelligent, much more experienced, and much more eloquently expressed versions of my own. Here's an excerpt which presents the general thesis of the book (so far as I've gotten):

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation.

Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common—not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits: wars, wars on crime, wars on poverty, national schemes of medical aid, insurance, immunization, further industrial and economic "growth," etc.; and these, of course, are followed by more regulatory laws and agencies to see that our health is protected, our freedom preserved, and our money well spent. Although there may be some "good intention" in this, there is little honesty and no hope. [emphasis mine throughout]

Berry wrote these words in the 1970s, and they are ever more true today. He is no conspiracy theorist, nor is he a ranting alarmist—he simply looks at our society from outside of our time, rejects the metanarrative of progress, and discusses what he sees rationally, point by point.

The Problem with "Regulation"

As the US fumes over how much money was paid to AIG execs in bonuses, I sit with, paradoxically, both the knowledge of and absolute disbelief in how incredibly gullible, underinformed, and downright stupid the average American is.

Those of you who are among the "outraged" may be mad at me now. Okay.

We've known about the bonuses for months - they are honoring contracts from over a year ago. See what else the current administration and congress have known about all along, and actually helped create.

The problem with this AIG business is that Congressional laws, Executive programs, Federal Reserve monetary policy, and federal and state financial regulators all had a hand in creating this mess. Their policies created the conditions which allowed the housing bubble and the opacity of derivatives contracts which have now given the world economy a turbulent ratcheting down of its belt size. Their policies and decisions turned a localized market overexpansion affecting a few states into a full-blown crisis that will, before it plays out, have drastic structural consequences to world finance, almost certainly bring about substantial geopolitical changes, possibly ignite new or expand existing regional conflicts, and likely shift the world reserve currency regime away from the American dollar (as Russia is already calling for - you think things are rough now? Just wait until the American dollar is no longer buoyed by its world debt- and commodity-denominator status). You know what the worst, and the most condemning, part of it all is? AIG played completely within the government-sanctioned rules, as this article from the Wall Street Journal makes clear.

No one administration is entirely at fault here - the causes of the conditions which gave rise to this debacle directly stretch back to the Clinton Administration, and, it may be argued, much further. Politicians - IF they should ever decide to point fingers within their ranks rather than at AIG execs and Tim Geithner - will undoubtedly say it is one administration's or one party's fault, but that is not the case. It is the fault of the notion of government economic planning and regulation, and nearly every administration since Andrew Jackson's has been guilty of that.

Why does the government - whether Congress, the president, the Federal Reserve banking conglomerate, or even their best and brightest Ivy League economists - think it can successfully regulate (assuming any one of them could even understand) every aspect of the country's economy? A better question - why do average citizens, who regularly complain about Washington's ineptitude, trust the government to understand and regulate the economy? Government intervention always has unintended consequences and always creates winners and losers, skewing the playing field to the benefit of some.

My same question asked above - why does the government think it can successfully regulate - applies just as aptly to food policy. On Monday, Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) went into effect. The idea is that all fresh fruits, veggies, and meats should be clearly marked as to where they came from. A good idea. But meats have more requirements, and fish have even more. For domestic small livestock producers and aquaculturists, this means additional costly paperwork and animal tagging when their profit margins on their small-scale enterprises are already low enough. Some may accept that this may very well be the cost of better regulation and food safety measures and that small producers will simply have to run more efficient businesses to stay competitive, and that's fair.

But, as always, government regulations are hypocrital. COOL does not apply to any food which has been processed in ANY way - smoked, emulsified, mixed with other ingredients - and does not apply to the ingredients included in processed foods. So, we can still import the salmonella- or E. coli-infested spinach from Mexico, but we'll sell it as prepared fresh mixed salad greens so no one will ever know the difference. We can import chicken from melamine China but we'll cook it and put it in some other finished product so we don't have to mention China on the label. You can read the USDA's own release here, or the MSNBC story here.

This law specifically aids food processors and large agribusinesses. Surprise, surprise. And, I suppose, the inverse is true - that this law specifically targets small producers - but I prefer not to take the angle of emotionalism when I can take the angle of fact.

As Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Congressional leaders whose campaign funds are essentially owned by financial interests, continue to spout off ideas how best to solve this "crisis" and then deflect criticism away from themselves onto corporate execs when the plans become unpopular, and as new government regulations on food safety are revealed to be a farce to aid large businesses, I ask this: when are we going to denounce this hypocrisy for what it is? When are we going to hold our governments and our elected officials responsible? Will the average citizen be willing to turn off his iPod, quit watching March Madness, quit being entertained for just a few minutes, put partisanism aside, engage his critical faculties potentially for the first time in years, take some measure of responsibility for himself, and ACT in our society as a citizen? (Oh, and you Canadians, this means you too - your government and its misguided policy-making is even more ubiquitous than the American, albeit, thankfully, much less corrupt.)

So that's the problem with "regulation" - that it always benefits some disproportionately, and there's always enough wiggle room while being completely within the regulation to create massive disturbances, whether in the world economy or in individuals' health.

What's the answer? Expect every citizen from the time of his or her childhood to take an active interest in our society and responsibility for his or her actions within it. Yeah, I know, about as likely to happen as fair policy coming out of Washington. I suppose that's a topic for another day.

What's wrong with this picture?

Beautiful, isn't it?

The expanse of amber wheat, the windbreak in the distance, the perspective of distance you would never experience in North Carolina.

I really do love living here in Saskatchewan sometimes. I could do with a month or so less of winter, a little more of a drawn-out autumn like we have back in NC, and without a few cultural practices I find annoying, but all in all it's a pretty good life. Seeing fields stretching to the horizon in every direction is sure a change of perspective from forested, hilly NC. And the sunsets! Unbelievable.

And the people here are different, too. These wide-open expanses, the rurality of this region, and the primacy of agriculture as livelihood sure do rear a different type of person from the busy, demanding, self-centered East Coast suburb. Not that social conditions here are idyllic, just different.

But can you tell me what's wrong with this picture?

Maybe you don't think anything is wrong, and maybe you won't agree with my assessment once I tell you what I think is wrong. Or maybe you've just never thought about these issues in the ways I do. Either way, hear me out.

I see a few things wrong here, things which matter a great deal to me as "causes", things I could "fight" if I were so inclined. Some of these things a great many social and environmental groups do indeed "fight" with protests and political action and petitions, all those democratic tools of discontent. I'll discuss each of the things I see wrong in future posts; for now, I'd like to give a somewhat lengthy introduction to this line of thought. Get a cup of tea and settle in.

The things I see wrong with this picture all stem from one fundamental concept of modern life that I see as seriously flawed: centralization. Centralization of governmental policy decisions, of capital and credit, of land use/zoning decisions, of the production of energy and other consumable goods, of food production/supply/processing, of economic policy, of security interests. I see all of that in this picture. Yeah, I know, I'm pretty screwed up.

I care a lot about the idea of sustainability. That's a term we hear a lot about these days, but I don't think many of us understand it. When I hear people casually using the term in the media, advertisements, etc., I notice that there is often more of a "maintainability" color to their discussion: "bio"fuels, alternative energy sources, organic farming, even different techniques of oil and gas production. Not that these things are inherently bad, but they are not sought after because they are truly sustainable but because they offer us different (and potentially less destructive) ways to maintain our current standard of living.

The problem is our current standard of living is in no way sustainable. And neither is our way of living. And neither is the centralization necessary to keep up either our standard or our way of living.

For the sake of increased productivity (and, therefore, for increased earnings and thus standard of living), workers moved production out of the home and into the workshop, out of the individual workshop and into the guild, out of the guild and into the factory. Ever since Frederick Taylor developed the idea of "scientific management" for factory workers in the late nineteenth century we've known the benefits, and the adverse effects, of the centralization of procedural decisions in the workplace and, by the extension of the factory model of management and of a few new inventions to the "industry" of agriculture, on the farm. And with the widespread use of the assembly line by Henry Ford came the realization that people acting as cogs in a machine could easily out-produce even highly-skilled independent, decentralized workers. We can accomplish so much more in this way, but at what cost?

Centralization of political and social institutions and specialization of labor were once beneficent hallmarks of civilization. Now, outside of a few select professions, they are little more than a way for the corporate boss to jerk us around. Specialization of labor creates the situation in which the centralization of planning is necessary to keep all the "cogs" working to potential (except in very small-scale communities with truly free markets - but market-moderation just doesn't work on the level of entire modern societies). Centralization of planning means those who do the planning have power over those so planned for. For evidence, take one look at the corporate atmosphere of today's average workplace and the stress and dissatisfaction it brings.

But what does this have to do with sustainability? Centralization for the sake of efficiency makes us act in ways that are not sustainable, since it removes the individual from the process of production of those things necessary for life. In agrarian societies, and within the last century in predominantly agrarian regions of "developed" nations, the majority of the people individually or as family units performed the tasks necessary for living and, hopefully, earned enough money to buy those few luxury and specialty goods they could not produce themselves. When one's labors are directed at producing those things necessary to live there comes a moderating influence which curbs consumption of extraneous goods. That moderating factor may be as simple as extra free time or as serious as the necessity to survive, but it is there; the moderation comes because one's labors are directly producing the majority of goods for his livelihood. Moderation in consumption conserves resources, thus enabling sustainability.

Another issue arises here: the agrarian (or otherwise predominantly self-sufficient) landholder-worker has a natural incentive to conserve his goods, to conserve his resources, and to improve his holding, since his continued survivability depends upon these elements (that is why the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer was, and is, so powerful - it could have, and should have, worked. But Jefferson did not foresee the California gold rush or the Civil War or the Irish potato famine or the rise of industrialism or the massive demographic shifts in their wake). Direct personal interest in the continued productive capacity of those things under one's care tends to steer one away from over-production of goods, an inefficient waste of labor and resources. This disincentive to waste directly enhances the chances for sustainability.

In today's society, moderation makes for bad business. We've seen that evidenced in the credit bubble. Even the limitations brought by the natural productive capacities of resources are circumvented through chemical means and by the outsourcing of production to foreign lands.

Those individuals who do produce in today's centralized system - industrial-scale farmers, hydropower operators, miners, factory workers - only produce one small element of the entire chain and never truly have an appreciation for what it takes to produce all the other goods of everyday life, and therefore are never moderated in their pursuit of those goods.

In fact, as long as goods enter the economy by no effort on the part of those not directly involved in their production (the vast majority of workers for any one specific good), then there is neither a moderating limitation on consumption nor a disincentive to work as a cog. In fact, the opposite is true: the ease with which a variety of goods not produced by the individual may be procured encourages the individual to work in his specialty all the more, to make more earnings, to procure more goods. That is why modern economic theory can legitimately be based upon the assumption of perpetual growth - because perpetual demand is a given within its framework.

And so we keep working, trading our time for money, paying taxes on our earnings, using the remainder to buy the stuff we need and want, hoping to "retire" someday. All the while we are investing and trusting more fully in the centralization of our economy and of political power into "a few strong hands".

Haven't the events of the last year shown us that centralization of finance opens up world markets to drastic blows from a small percentage of faulty investments in a very few localities? That centralization of food processing can have far-flung deadly effects when something goes wrong, and that centralized food safety regulation fails horribly when one processing plant slips through the cracks? That centralization of government power cannot help but create winners and losers in any of its endeavors? That centralization of economic thought leads to "corrective" responses tantamount to the original problems?

And in any way did any of this centralization add to the sustainability of current human endeavor? No. No, we just pass the buck to someone else, to someone on the other side of the world, the country, the aisle of Congress, or to a different generation entirely. The responses of centralization tell us to keep spending so our GDP doesn't look so bad and so China can still afford to subsidize our "stimulus", to hold more debt than we can afford so we won't put any more pressure on the banks, to trust the new regulatory regimes which will in time fail us just like the old ones did. And in the meantime we continue to rape the earth.

In the end, the individual lives and dies. In the end, every notion of existence is decentralized. Why, then, do we go along with centralization and the loss of personal liberty it brings? Why do we trust the centralized powers even though they exploit the earth and destroy peoples' lives? Is it just because it's easier, or is it simply to slough off responsibility for one's own actions onto the group?

So, what's wrong with this picture?