Thursday, June 19, 2008
Strength and Weakness
I was involved in a rather enlightening forum discussion today, involving alternative energy. With gas prices as high as they are, energy is on everyone’s mind, and everyone has their own pet solution to the problem. Nuclear, wind, and solar are being batted around constantly, compressed air and turkey gut fermentation come up periodically, and once in awhile one even sees the occasional cold fusion nutter come out of the woodwork. I sat on the sidelines for awhile, and then I couldn’t take it anymore.
I linked to some of Steven den Beste’s old posts on alternative energy (here, among others), where the conclusion basically is that those fancy ideas range from totally nuts, to cute but impractical, to a nice idea but totally inadequate for a modern society. None of the solutions we have today are really meaningful solutions, as much as we would like them to be.
I learned something. When in a den of hippies, slamming alternative energy is like informing them that someone just accidentally smoked the last patchouli plant in the world. They went absolutely berserk.
I was hoping to have a rational, science-based discussion of the ideas they were batting around. People batting around ideas is what good forums are all about. I figured, great, lets base the discussion on some facts.
Apparently some facts are unacceptable.
Then all of a sudden, I realized with horror – these people vote.
Voting is open to all, and that’s the way most people think it should be. It is democracy’s greatest strength, while simultaneously being it’s greatest weakness. It is our strength, because everyone is within the system, everyone has more to gain by propping up the system than by tearing it down, everyone has a sense of all being in it together, for better or for worse. It is in this opposition, in the conflict of interests inherent to democracy, that lies our stability and our strength.
It is our greatest weakness because when we as a nation get something right, it is usually by accident. More typically, we lurch from one silly thing to the next, over and over, in and endlessly repeating cycle.
The body politic acts a lot like a stereotypical American individual. Willing to do the right thing, as long as it isn’t too much work and doesn’t take too long. Happy to take the easy road over the hard road, even though the easy road will likely lead to failure. Excited about fads, and willing to ostracize anyone that doesn’t buy in. And very happy to take what isn’t theirs, as long as they can get away with it.
Some prefer to sit in the grandstand and observe the proceedings, trying our best to stay above the fray. Nock felt that politics was nothing more than “boob-bumping”, equivalent to and as pointless as the fans of two sports teams rioting and trying to shout one another down. Fairly early in life he even decided that voting was pointless.
My conscience will never let me detach myself from society that completely. I could never bring myself to not vote, thus being complicit in the election of the greater of two evils.
But even so, with the advent of the messianic Obama progressive movement, pseudoscience masquerading as environmentalism with the ultimate goal (intentional or otherwise) of destroying our way of life, and socialist rhetoric being used even by “our” candidate, I’m feeling more and more marginalized. Nock saw his place as that of a social critic, pointing out the silliness of society without materially participating in it. I feel it would be supremely arrogant for an amateur like me to declare myself in his company, on the same mission, and yet, that’s how I feel. On the sidelines, in the grandstand, watching silly people do their silly things.
Nock felt though that one’s goal should not be to change society, for society will never change. Human nature is too strong to be reformed in any meaningful way. Instead, we improve ourselves, while trying to help the occasional like-minded person along the same path we’ve found for ourselves.
Amidst the storm of hippie scorn, one person told me that reading den Beste’s words was like reading something “plagiarized from [his own] unwritten memoirs.” One person.
One person who gets it.
That makes it all worth it.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Away
As a farmer, one thing that you don’t get to do that other people seem to take for granted is travel or go on vacation. We put in hours of work around the farm every day, and obviously it’s not something that you can just drop at a moments notice. In addition, with as varied an operation as ours, it’s difficult to find someone to farm-sit for us. Simply throwing hay and water at animals is easy - simple task and simple labor. Getting under cows and goats to milk is not for the unskilled or the faint of heart.
A few years ago, we made a decision to have a long-term goal of moving further away from civilization. This was for a variety of reasons.
Cities and the people that live there stress us out. Grocery trips are tolerable but stressful chore. Malls are to be avoided at nearly all costs. Traffic is just plain evil.
In addition, we are cold weather people. Even two to three months of hot weather is enough to make us long for colder climes. Part of the issue is that for monetary reasons, we choose to live without air conditioning. To some extent, AC would be counterproductive, as in order to work in the heat, one’s body must be acclimated to the heat. Working and living in the heat is just part of life, unless we are able to live and work in a location where the climate naturally suits us.
About a year and a half ago, we purchased some land on an island in one of the Great Lakes. Isolated, quiet, beautiful, and with a moderate climate that suits us perfectly. Yes, it’s iced in for three months out of the year, but if we can manage to become as self-sufficient as we’d like, that shouldn’t be a significant inconvenience. Coastal land on the island is incredibly expensive, out of reach to all except CEOs and wealthy retirees. But interior land is fairly cheap and plentiful. We don’t need to live on a beach. Being able to drive there in 5 minutes is good enough.
This land is old farmland - cleared forest as is much of the midwest. It was being actively cultivated fifty years ago, but it has largely been let go since then. It has started to grow back into blueberries, junipers, maples, and birches, but there is still a good bit of open space.
This week, we begin our quest to turn this rawness into our new home. We’ll be spending about five days up there, partially clearing the land and partially relaxing. A working vacation, if you will. Reclaiming this land is a fairly long process, as the junipers acidify the soil and make it inhospitable for grasses and pasture legumes. Step one is to remove the acidifying junipers and conifers, and to thin the shading deciduous trees. Step two, slated probably for next year, will be to lime the soil to being the ph up, so that a pasture can be planted.
When we bought our current farm, we bought a near-exhausted hay field with nothing on it. We had a house built, and we built the rest of our facilities ourselves. It is an evolving thing - as our experience grows and our needs change, our farm configuration changes. Our farm never looks the same from year to year. One of these years we hope to be in a more or less final state, able to sit back and maintain what we have rather than continually constructing and reconfiguring.
Sometimes we think we are nuts for wanting to start from scratch again. Then we look at the attractiveness of the location and the basic knowledge we have now that can make the next farm structurally better from day one, and we think it just might all be worth it. We’ve always been ambitious people, even when we don’t necessarily have the energy to follow through with that ambition.
One thing we’ve learned about ourselves is that if we have a goal that we really want to achieve, we’re going to meet that goal one way or another. This year, we’ve got a friend that has some farm experience that is going to watch the farm for us while we start investing our time and labor in farm number two. It is a bit intimidating, but honestly, I’m excited as a little kid. I can’t wait to get started.
Friday, June 06, 2008
Knowledge
Have you ever finished a book, thoroughly enjoyed it, and then gotten the urge to scan the entire thing into your computer so that you can use a search engine for instant recall of the contents of the book?
I have. I’ve never actually done it, but I’ve been tempted.
Knowledge is a strange thing. There are many facets of it - facts, algorithms, and even just grounding knowledge or lenses through which we view the world.
Not too long ago, I decided to “reeducate” myself in the classical manner, focusing on history, literature, and language - all of those things that are given lip service but otherwise neglected in a modern education. I’m finding my reaction to and assimilation of various types of knowledge to be interesting.
I’m starting to think that my memory is shot, because facts and details don’t seem to stick with me very long. Facts are important - facts are the building blocks upon which logical deductions and persuasive arguments are based. Without facts and the ability to recall them, one can be convinced of something, but one will have a very difficult time conveying information to others. The internet has been a huge boon in this respect, with tremendous amounts of information available and searchable in seconds. I think to some extent having the internet around will allow some people to me more intellectually lazy than they otherwise would be. For me, it seems to fill a recall gap that I can’t fill on my own.
More importantly, I’m noticing that they way I look at the world has changed. Somewhere in one of Nock’s books, I couldn’t find the passage if my life depended on it, he talks about how the goal of education is not to impart a knowledge of trivia, but to change the way one thinks. I think the most important thing I have learned is the inherent value of western civilization, and the characteristics of western culture that are necessary to bring about that value. Having such a grounding makes moral equivalence, cultural “tolerance”, and multicultural education arguments simultaneously easier to understand and easier to dismiss as so much hot air. I have always been a history junkie. However, where once my picture of history was a pencil sketch, now it is a three-dimension full color sculpture, alive, vibrant, and rich. Connections have become apparent, understanding has resulted, and a certain amount of peace has resulted due to an acceptance of how the world works and what things are a result of unchangeable human nature.
But there are still gaps. Plenty of them.
Another thing I’ve noticed in my studies is a tendency to form intuitive links between items of information that have not been explicitly tied together. In essence, I jump to conclusions, pulling together disparate pieces of information into a coherent concept. The problem is, sometimes those conclusions are wrong, and sometimes it is difficult to even retrace one’s steps to determine how one came to that wrong conclusion. I’ve noticed this tendency in the past, and I’ve wondered exactly how much of what I “know” is actually based on this rather fallible intuitive knowledge. I don’t think it’s something I can determine. The only thing I can do is keep studying and continue to fill in more gaps.
Nock was once asked if he would take a position as an English professor at a university. He said that he was flattered but not really interested, as he saw English as a rather pointless subject. He said that everything anyone ever needs to know about literature is right there in the library, and that all he could really to do is point people to it. If students were unwilling to seek out and absorb knowledge on their own, what point is there in him lecturing at them? And if they were willing to study on their own, the world is there at their fingertips and they didn’t need his guidance beyond pointing out the source of the knowledge they desired.
I feel that way about the entire body of cultural knowledge that I’ve begun to expose myself to. These days, one cannot acquire such knowledge in a classroom setting, because no educational institution actually values our cultural knowledge in that way any longer. It is sad that we turn student and student out into the world with no appreciation of country or culture, just a thin layer of politically-correct drivel overlaid onto a base of theoretically useful skills for the job market. We are left to learn pride of our forefathers from our families and friends, as well as from our cultural heritage of history and literature, because our leadership no longer believes in any of that in any meaningful way. That foundation is what makes this a great country, that desire to know and do what is right, and we must be steadfast in doing so even as popular culture and the dominant political climate move on to more progressive things.
The internet has given us the opportunity to form virtual communities to augment or replace the social structures for dissemination of values and knowledge that have largely disappeared in our society. We learn from each other, set each other straight when we go wrong, and buck each other up in the face of adversity.
Most importantly, I think, we are able to share knowledge of all kinds with one another - facts, logic, and a deeper appreciation for our country and culture. Those that seek out that knowledge are the ones that will preserve the the legacy of our nation into the future. It’s going to be a rough ride, but someone has to do it.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Neo-Cons
Since William F. Buckley died a few months ago, I’ve been finding myself making more and more connections with the history of the conservative movement in America. Some of what I’m finding has surprised me a bit.
I’ve been a reader of National Review for quite a few years, and much of the writing in that publication seemed to be colored by the vision of its founder. The history of the magazine influences the presentation of their topics in a fairly significant but subtle way, but it is really quite rare for them to explicitly dig into their history and discuss where they collectively came from.
Much of my exposure to conservative writers has been those in the period I’ve seen called the “Old Right”, men writing in the 20s, 30s, and 40s during the popularization of progressivism. These men, like Albert Jay Nock and H L Mencken, saw progressivism for what it was, a big step on the way to losing the basic freedoms we take for granted in America, and they weren’t shy about saying so. However, history saw them steamrolled by popular opinion as the Great Depression and subsequent New Deal brought huge new powers to government.
When Eisenhower came to power, he famously declared that traditional conservatism was all but dead, and that anyone who tried to roll back the progressive entrenchment of the New Deal was a fool. While he may have been correct from a political point of view, conservative ideals in both the populace and in a small fringe segment of the intelligentsia were far from dead. National Review was largely a reaction to this “conservatism is dead” idea – giving a voice and some coherence to the far-flung elements of conservatism that remained.
Then came the sixties, and the neo-cons.
Neo-con is one of those words that has become virtually meaningless with time, as it is mostly used as a slur. If you support the war in Iraq, you are a neo-con and therefore bad. Similar to “fascist”, it is a catch-all term for ideas and people that the speaker doesn’t like.
However, neo-con has a real meaning that is derived from a fairly recent political movement. In the sixties and seventies, the left split, largely over Vietnam. The New Left were the protesters and draft dodgers, the ones that believed that America was fundamentally evil since we bombed villages and killed babies. The Neo-Cons were the elements of the left that felt that the war in Vietnam was a vital part of fighting Communism. In fact, the neo-cons had one crucial element in common with the rest of conservatism – they believed in the fundamental goodness of America and our version of democracy, and they felt it was our duty to oppose the evil oppressive nature of communism and the desire of the Soviet Union to spread that communism around the world. Many of these people ended up changing political sides, allying themselves going forward with the conservative movement and the Republican party, without necessarily giving up their progressive ideals.
Thus are very strange alliances forged.
In the latest issue of City Journal, there is a collection of short essays by various writers, all reminiscing about their experiences in 1968. Several mock the events of the day, clearly having recognized at the time that the rebellious protest culture that flourished was absurd and foolish. Others revel in the memory of the rebellion and pat themselves on the back. This jarred me a little bit – people on my side don’t do things like that. Do they?
It’s like going to a party, looking around and seeing all of the people you know and expect, and then those people walk in. And you think to yourself – who invited them?
Now that I know a bit more about it, that’s how I feel about the neo-con movement. To me, conservatism is more about culture, values, and an honorable state of interacting with one’s fellow man than it is about an interventionist world view. The willingness to fight communism, for example, grows out of the appreciation for western civilization and the belief in the rights of peoples to self-determination and freedom. I have a hard time accepting under the same conservative tent those who feel interventionism is justified, for whatever reason, without having the same cultural and social values that I do. Conservatism is so much more than just being willing to invade Iraq or Vietnam.
Political necessity makes for alliances of convenience. I can accept that as a fact of life. What I don’t like is being identified with a group of people which whom I have exactly one thing in common and a huge list of fundamental differences. We can be political allies of convenience, sure. But we are not under the same tent, no matter how much the popular vocabulary has changed to imply that this is the case.
A hippie that believes in interventionism is still a hippie, even if said hippie is 40 years older and wearing a suit. People can change, I know. But I don’t think these people necessarily have.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Spring
Warning - picture-heavy post ahead.
Spring on the farm is both exciting and exhausting. There is so much going on after winter has passed, everything starting up all at once. This is to give you some idea of what we’ve been up to, and why my posting has been a bit scarce lately.
As I am sure you will notice, I am not the world’s best photographer. I see things for what they are, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. My photography tends to reflect that, for better or for worse.
We have varying success with different breeds of animals. I can’t tell you why exactly, but with very few exceptions we’ve always been successful with milk cows.
About four years ago, we decided to get a milk cow just for family use. We found a local farmer, bought a Jersey-cross from him, had her delivered, and all was well. We asked this farmer if the cow was used to electric fences, and if a single strand would be sufficient. Of course, he said, that’s how his farm was laid out.
That lasted about thirty minutes. The cow went right through the fence, looking for her herd. Given that she didn’t know us, she wouldn’t hold still for us as we tried to catch her. We chased her around the neighborhood for about four hours before finally trapping her in someone’s barn. At that point, we didn’t even know how to get her home, so I called the farmer, in somewhat of a panic, asking if he could come haul her back to our place for us. He grudgingly agreed. He unloaded her, and we immediately tied her up.
Over the next couple days, it became abundantly clear that we were in over our heads. This cow had torn a teat while running through the forest. Between the injury, the new environment, and our inexperience, she had no interest in letting us milk her. When a thousand pound animal is dead-set against being milked, there’s not much you can do about it.
Without milking her, we were afraid one of two things were going to happen. One, she would dry up and be a huge useless mouth to feed. Two, she would get mastitis, an udder infection sometimes caused by being insufficiently milked out, and we could end up with a dead cow. Again I went hat in hand to the farmer, asking him to bail us out by taking the cow back. He did, and I gave him some money for his trouble. I didn’t give him nearly enough.
After licking our wounds for awhile, we worked up some courage and tried again. This time, with a calf. We went back to that same farmer, who I am surprised let us back on his farm, and bought a ten day old calf, just weaned. We bottle-fed her, took care of her, and nurtured her, until she grew into a beast affectionately nicknamed “Moose”. Every bovine on our farm now is descended from that cow.
The picture above shows the two calves born this year, daughter and grandson of that original cow. The one on the left is about a week and a half old, and the one on the right is about eight hours old. I admit, there is a certain amount of pride we feel in how far we’ve come.
This is Moose, aka Wensleydale, out on pasture. We grass-fed our livestock as much as possible, leaving them on pasture from April to November unless drought strikes. They are happier, cleaner, more healthy, and it saves us the work and expense of cutting hay and bringing it to them.
Goats are frustrating animals. Well-trained cattle are hardy, easy to work, easy to keep contained, and mostly non-destructive to their surroundings. Goats have none of these admirable qualities. Being upland animals rather than prairie animals, they are used to a different environment and a more mineral-rich diet than what can be naturally provided in my area. We do our best to supplement their feed, but still, something always seems to be missing. Worse, because goats are smaller animals with no real commercial purpose, for many years they’ve been bred for pets and show animals rather than for livestock. They require coddling, and we have neither the time nor the inclination to do that. Some members of our family are not able to drink cow milk, so we keep the goats around for them. However, they are an exercise in frustration, with many more failures than successes. Pictured here are three of the six kids born this year.
Sheep are similar to goats in that they are from a more upland area, with the resulting difficulty in getting them feed with an appropriate nutrient profile. However, they are much more interesting and beautiful animals from my point of view. Easier to fence, not willfully destructive (except for the occasional ram in rut), while being independent and smart in their own sheep-like way. We chose to keep Icelandic sheep because of their intelligence and their ability to withstand cold weather. Because of the diet issues, we have not had a lot of success with them, but we still keep them around for meat and wool.
One of our more ambitious projects this year is a rather large garden. We’ve tried gardening many times before, only to fail miserably as the summer wears on and more important things come up. One thing that I never before realized that is now obvious in hindsight - gardening is nowhere near as easy at one might think. Till, plant, water, harvest. Right? Nope. All of that, and hundreds of little details to coax your plants towards producing something edible.
Out of everything we’ve done, the garden has been most instructive in terms of teaching us how much knowledge of food production has been lost on current generations. We are book-learners - if we want to do something, we find a book on the topic and dive in. That didn’t work at all when it came to gardening. This year, my wife is working with a friend on the garden, going to bare ground to as much preserved food as possible for both our families. This friend learned to garden from her Japanese father, who learned to garden from his father. No one in our families is available to teach us, so we use the resources available to us and end up with knowledge that isn’t even a part of our own culture. It’s a small world here in this melting pot that is America.
Would you believe that most chickens these days are bred so heavily for commercial purposes that they won’t even reproduce if left to their own devices? We’ve tried for years to create a self-sustaining flock of chickens. This year, we are trying a few birds of several different breeds, hoping to find one that is hardy, able to reproduce, and still produces enough meat and eggs to pay their way. Also in that brooder are a hundred and some “junk birds” - males of egg-laying breeds that are “useless” and therefore are dirt cheap. We’re raising them this year as cheap meat, and to see if birds from egg-laying breeds have enough meat on them to make them worthwhile.
Pigs are another difficult animal, though they are one that we cannot live without. Pork is one of our favorite meats, and unfortunately, we are finding piglets increasingly hard to come by. Pigs are destructive because they love to dig. Therefore, they need to be kept in fairly expensive specialized housing. At least, the three hundred pound breeding animals do. Few people breed pigs, and it seems that over time, more and more of the smaller producers are getting out of the business. We are left buying piglets from large producers that breed fragile unhealthy animals that have never seen the light of day. Our pigs are raised in a large pen in the woods, so they get fresh air and natural shade. We are finding though that if they were born and weaned in an enclosed facility, the mortality rate upon switching to our method is unacceptably high. Primitive housing for pigs may be less efficient, but it makes for healthier animals and much higher quality meat. I fear for the future, as our options in this area become fewer and fewer. I do not want to have to raise piglets myself.
The tractors.
We own plenty of hay field for our needs, but we are right on the edge of being too small to make owning, storing, and repairing a tractor of our own cost-effective. We end up paying a couple thousand dollars a year to hire someone to cut and bale our hay. We’ve decided to remedy this situation, while taking a slightly different road to meet our needs. Due to the fact that we are a fairly small operation, we don’t necessarily need the power and efficiency that a tractor provides. Therefore, we have the ability to try a less time-efficient, but more cost-effective route - horses and horse drawn equipment. There are quite a few Amish people in our area, and though the network is sometimes hard to tap into, there are quite a few local resources for primitive yet highly sophisticated and functional equipment. Last fall we bought a pair of trained draft horses, and since then, we’ve been rounding up older haying equipment.
We’re finding that haying with horses is easier said than done. Tractors go when you tell them to - horses aren’t necessarily quite so cooperative. These horses are well-trained, but they are easily frightened by loose dogs in the neighborhood. We are currently working on getting the horses to trust us to protect them, and to obey us even under difficult circumstances. It’s a difficult and frustrating situation, depending on two “tractors” with minds of their own, but I suspect it will be very rewarding when it is all worked out.
We’ve got a few other minor operations underway - rabbits, beehives, etc - but that’s enough to give you a flavor of what’s going on around here. Yes, it’s a lot of work. If it were economically feasible, I’d be doing it full-time. The sense of accomplishment on the farm is nothing at all like the satisfaction one gets from a desk job. It is definitely more efficient to work the desk job and to buy food that someone else has raised. However, life is about more than simple efficiency. It is also about satisfying work, a peaceful environment in which to live, and a healthy and stimulating place to raise kids.
You could never convince me to go back to the city.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Growth
My wife and I lived in the Chicago area for a few years, first going to school and then working. First we lived in an apartment in the inner city (Obama territory, to be exact). We tolerated it all right, but it quickly became clear that dense urban living was not our cup of tea. When the opportunity arose, we bought a small house in a near working-class suburb. We couldn’t afford much, but it was a decent house in a decent neighborhood, and it sure beat paying rent.
Within a couple years, an opportunity arose to move back home. I got obscenely lucky in getting a job with one of the few employers in my field in the area, so we jumped at the chance. By this time, we were firmly set on rural living. The company that I would be working for is about a twenty-minute drive outside the city itself, already in a fairly rural area. My commute in Chicago had been one hour, so I set my commuting tolerance in our new location at half that. We drew a thirty mile circle around my new place of employment, and looked to see where the land was the cheapest while still being suitable for our intended farming operation. We ended up a couple miles outside a town of three hundred people, ten miles away from the nearest grocery store, and thirty minutes on the freeway away from the nearest big box store. It’s rural, all but the main roads in my area are dirt, but close enough to town to be convenient.
That has been the situation for about six years. But times, they are a-changin’.
My first clue was a couple months ago when on the way home, I began to notice something new. Luxury cars, driven by 50-something grey-haired men in suits, going about 80 miles on hour on the country roads, illegally passing anyone who happened to be in their way.
The invasion has begun.
We call them house farms - big fields that used to grow crops, that now contain a bunch of big, gaudy, modern houses with no trees, Lexuses and BMWs in the garage, and 3 acres to mow. I don’t mind new people so much. It’s the attitude they bring with them. The self-important arrogance of busy city life.
Growth is inevitable, and to fight against it is foolish. We did our analysis to determine where to live - it is only reasonable to assume that others will do likewise sooner or later. The same rural atmosphere with access to suburban convenience can’t stay a secret forever. But, as it is discovered, it is virtually guaranteed to disappear. We’ve known all along that eventually we’d have to move farther away, and doing so is already built-in to our long-term plan.
Though growth is inevitable, it is still somewhat sad to see the local atmosphere change. It is like innocence lost, never to be regained. I hadn’t realized how much I had taken it for granted.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Food Makers
When you get a block of really good cheese, do you:
Taste it, savor it, and enjoy it?
Or
All of the above, then do a quick calculation to figure out what amortizing the cost of keeping a milk cow over a year comes out to per pound of cheese, of course with the assumption that your time is free? Followed by scouring the internet for real region-specific cheese cultures, since in the past you’ve discovered that readily available domestic cheese cultures make nasty tasting cheese? Followed by trying to decide if getting a wholesale importers license to get cheap bulk cheese cultures from Europe is worth the hassle?
If you picked option number two, you’d be insane. You’d also be describing a typical day in the American Farmer household.
We get a little obsessive about our food. It all started because of various health problems, in that some members of our family are restricted to only food of the highest quality. Running down to the store for a pound of bacon, a gravy packet, or even some milk is out of the question. Once we figured out how to manage the diet to minimize the health problems, we started getting used to the good food.
That’s dangerous. Good food is addicting, and it reduces one’s tolerance for other lower quality foods that aren’t subject to the health restrictions.
Now, two milk cows, four milk goats, six chest freezers, and a bazillion mason jars later, here we are. We eat extremely well. We’re not completely food self-sufficient, but we’re close, and getting closer.
We’re a little strange that way too. We produce much of our own food in part out of necessity, as to buy food produced like we produce it would be prohibitively expensive. However, in addition to that, we enjoy it. We enjoy the lifestyle, we enjoy the work, we enjoy the challenge, we enjoy learning new things, and we enjoy the economic benefit and freedom associated with being somewhat insulated from market fluctuations.
As diesel prices skyrocket, we look to invest in horse power. It’s slower, but it has the advantages of elegance, simplicity, and reliability. As feed prices skyrocket, we look to invest in equipment to raise our own feed grain. It’s more work than driving to the grain elevator and buying it, but it has the advantage of stability and convenience.
As I get older, I find myself becoming more of a user in some things. For example, I used to really like playing with the guts if computers. Rebuilding them, upgrading them, tweaking them, etc. These days, if it doesn’t work immediately and let me get on with the task at hand, I get quite irritated. I don’t want to fix it, I was to use it. I feel the same way about most of my tools and facilities.
To me, food is different for some reason. We will never be a truly self-sustaining farm, as I have no intention of learning to mine, smelt, and smith to make the knives used on my hay mower, for example. But we can get close to being truly self-sustaining. Animals and plants automatically replenish themselves – grass pastures are the ultimate solar collectors. Grass uses solar energy to build plant matter, cows use plant matter to build meat and milk, meat and milk are used to sustain us in our endeavors to keep the whole system contained, functional, and efficient.
There is a certain beauty in the concept of a self-contained farm that I find irresistible. The quest for that beauty is addicting, and I’m not at all eager to give up being a maker. Maybe when I’m old and grey…. but then, maybe not. The reality is, I’ll probably be out in the orchard or working the bees until the day I die.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Atticus
When I pick up a new book to read, I usually do my best to remain completely ignorant of it’s content up to the point of actually reading it. I’ve picked up a passing familiarity with the book from somewhere, and some reason to believe that I’m going to find it interesting. However, I do my best to avoid reading book jackets, back covers, and sometimes even introductions if they contain too much detail. I find the resulting process of discovery to be a highly enjoyable.
Later, after I’ve read the book and digested it’s contents in ignorance, I research the author, the context in which the book was written, prior works that influenced this author and future works this author influenced, etc. I want to experience a book and like or dislike it on it’s own merits, and then as a somewhat separate activity, try to understand how each book fits into the historical and cultural context of our civilization. That research usually leads me on to the other things that get added to the reading list.
Sometimes in doing this after-the-fact background research, I discover things about the book that I totally missed while reading it. The homosexual undertones of The Picture of Dorian Grey, for example, went completely over my head. I was somewhat astounded to discover that the book was controversial in it’s day because of this content, none of which was explicit enough or even suggestive enough for me to have caught on. But then, I’m also learning that there are as many interpretations of books as there are readers, and that sometimes these interpretations are colored by what people want to see in a book, and what they know about the author. By approaching each book with my mind as a tabula rosa, I learn something from my own reaction to the book, but I also learn from the reactions of others.
I read To Kill a Mockingbird awhile back, and besides thoroughly enjoying the book, I found the post-reading research to be very interesting. The book was written in 1960, about life in a rural southern town in the 1930s. A white man falsely accuses a black man of raping his daughter, and the only person willing to stand up for the black man in court is Atticus Finch, a local lawyer that is an upright and honorable man. Atticus is vilified by the populace for daring to question the word of a white man against that of a black man, and then for proving the white man to be a liar in court. The black man is still convicted, and ends up being killed while trying to escape from prison.
Given the civil rights movement that was in full swing when this book was published, it is easy to see why this book became immediately popular. The south of the Jim Crow era truly was an oppressive time, with institutions and social sentiments that were relics of the era of slavery. Blacks were no longer slaves, but they most definitely were kept as an underclass, socially and economically. Nearly everyone working against that systematic oppression was on the side of the angels (terrorists and other extremists excepted).
In the years since the book was written, Atticus Finch has proven to be a hugely influential role model for lawyers in general, and southern lawyers in particular. Everyone likes to bash lawyers, and much of the criticism is rightly deserved. However, some people do go into the legal profession to help the poor and oppressed, and many of these people look to Atticus as a role model.
One thing that I find fascinating about Harper Lee is that she spent a few years living in the limelight created by her best-selling book and Pulitzer Prize, and then decided she wasn’t going to do any more interviews. She cited the monotonous questions and the general misunderstanding of her intent in the book as her reasons for choosing to avoid the press. In reading about her, I can almost sense her frustration and impatience with all of these people that just don’t get it.
The other day I had a conversation with a southern liberal lawyer who didn’t explicitly say anything about Atticus or his influence, but who very clearly fits the mold of someone I would consider a modern follower of Atticus Finch. This lawyer was on a mission, giving of his time and energy to end what he saw as the still pervasive racism in this country.
What blew my mind was that one of the biggest problems he could find to tackle was the discrepancy in sentencing between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. I was dumbfounded.
The chivalrous lawyers of yesterday physically stood in the way of a lynch mob to protect an innocent man… while the chivalrous lawyers of today claim racism because a known criminal might go to prison for life instead of for twenty years? And they dare to consider themselves inspired by their predecessors?
Oh, how our standards have fallen.
In the book, the starkest contrast is not between white and black characters, but between those with dignity and those without. Atticus, many of his neighbors, the accused black man and his family - all were kind, generous, upstanding people who do well and live rightly. The black man’s accuser, on the other hand, was an ignorant fool that lived like a slob and treated even his own family poorly. The fool falsely accuses the upstanding black man, and the deeply flawed society, with one exception, lets him get away with it. That one exception, standing up to real oppression, is to be commended.
Fast forward to today. Well-meaning whites and culture-separatist blacks have joined forces to virtually destroy all semblance of dignity in the black community. I am told that racism still persists and that it is pervasive in our society. I am certain that is true in certain subsets of the population, but I don’t at all believe that ‘equal protection under the law’ is fundamentally compromised in this day and age. What is left is a black culture that has created the vast majority of it’s own problems, and do-gooders, supposedly inspired by Atticus, that continue to make excuses for the failures of that culture.
If your courageous stand against oppression involves fighting against unfair cocaine sentencing guidelines, or reparations, or affirmative action, that should be a hint that you aren’t on the side of the angels any longer. I can almost hear Harper Lee’s groans of frustration in dealing with yet another person that just doesn’t get it.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Culture Shock
I think it is probably fair to say that I don’t get out much. Mostly that is by choice. I’m happy on the farm. Some people are infected with wanderlust, but when I sit around and try to plan a vacation, there aren’t too many places that I have a real need to go see. Most of the places I would like to see are interesting because of the history and culture of a place, but honestly, the places that are sufficiently interesting to make me want to get up and go are rare. I like being home more than being just about anywhere else in the world.
I’ve often wondered how that is going to translate into an inherent disconnect with society in the long run. We don’t really go to movies, watch TV, or pay attention to popular culture much at all. Every once in awhile something strikes me as really strange, like the culture moved on and left me behind. I’m mostly fine with that, in fact, I see that as a significant benefit when it comes to raising kids. I don’t want them exposed to popular culture.
However, there is a downside to this isolation too. No man is an island, and no one should raise children on an island, expecting to shove them out into the world at 18 or 21, with the expectation that they will be able to cope with the world before them in a healthy and responsible manner. I’m perfectly fine with society leaving me behind, and I want it to leave my kids behind as well, but not to the point that they are crippled in their future social interactions and opportunities. My intent is to teach them some maturity first, then to expose them to the world in a controlled fashion, with my supervision and guidance. Exactly how this is going to happen I’m not sure yet, but it sounds good in theory anyway.
Sometimes I am reminded exactly why we live the lives we do, homeschooling, living out in the middle of nowhere, mostly keeping to ourselves. My son is advancing in his reading skills, and he’s becoming bored with the books we have in the house. The obvious answer is to find something new, so we head off to the library. We’ve got a little country library a couple miles from home, mostly full of junk. I use it regularly as a drop point for books shipped in from other libraries, but browsing the few shelves they’ve got there is mostly pointless, even for children’s books.
So I got my son all excited about going into town to go to the big fancy suburban library. I’d been there a few times - it’s in a wealthy community, a fairly new suburb with lots of people out and about.
We get there, and he thinks it’s a pretty neat place. They had a TON of books, compared to the little country library. They even had helpful librarians set out books on the tops of the shelves that they think kids might like. Being five, my son of course gravitates toward the flashy books on the tops of the shelves. “How about that one, Dad?” “That one looks nice!”
I pick them up to make sure they are appropriate for his reading level, and I start to notice a trend.
Multiculturalism theme. Uh, no. Back on the shelf.
Environmentalism theme. Huh? No way. Back on the shelf.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears! Ah, that sounds better!
Um, wait a minute. Why is the little bear in a wheelchair?
*flip flip flip*
Oh, because the story has been changed so that Goldilocks learns to be sensitive to those with disabilities, and they all live happily ever after.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
At this point I change tactics. No more books from the top shelf. I hand my son a couple books and tell him to go sit in a chair, look through them, and tell me if he likes them. In the meantime, I start hunting for books that look old. You know, old nasty binding, with printing on the spine that is worn. I pull a few off, hand them to my son, he picks a few, and we go on our merry way. I notice a trend in these books too – all originally published before 1980. Not a single liberal moral to be found in any of them.
Before we leave, we get sidetracked into the kids play room, fully set up to entertain and educate kids for hours. There are about ten play stations in the room, each with a different toy or activity. And each with an 8.5” by 11” sheet of paper, detailing how the kid should play with the toys, what they should learn, and the value of this particular activity to your child in the long run.
I very nearly laughed out loud. Earlier in the day, my son and daughter had gone down to the forest at the edge of the pasture by our house, and began constructing Eeyore’s house out of a tree and some sticks they found lying around.
Teach them how to play? What kind of genius does it take to think that is even necessary?
After I got over the irritation of the whole experience, I started to think about why it bothered me. I realized – I had stepped back into modern culture and had experienced culture shock on a scale that I hadn’t seen in a long time.
Every once in awhile I am reminded why I choose to be out of step with modern culture. I don’t need my kid’s lessons infused with lessons of misplaced moral judgments. He doesn’t need to learn to treat people with darker skin with extra respect, because he’s taught in daily life to respect everyone. He doesn’t need to be taught to look at the environment through the eyes of green-minded suburbanites, he already interacts on a daily basis with the plants and animals that provide his sustenance. He respects the environment in a very real and tangible way because he knows that his own good stewardship is vital to our family’s food supply.
Where did we go wrong? When did reading, writing, and arithmetic get turned into an opportunity for molding the morality of our children from the very first moments? I know much of this was actually intended by those in the compulsory education movement, and that much of what I saw simply reflects the sentiments of the community that supports that library. People want their kids taught that sort of thing. In thinking about it, the books I choose frequently have a moral theme too. Aesop’s fables, for example. But then, those morals tend to be along the lines of don’t be greedy, don’t be a jerk, etc, as opposed to slashing and burning the rainforests is baaaaaad! I guess societal morality left me behind too.
Sometimes I wonder how my kids are going to fare in the world, when they grow up and find themselves completely out of step with the dominant culture. The argument largely boils down to the same argument in Nock’s sarcastic essay The Disadvantages of Being Educated. If we know in advance that by properly educating our kids we will be making them social misfits, are we really doing them any favors? I believe, and Nock agrees, that a real, thoughtful education has its own immense value, value that cannot be measured in wealth or popularity. I can only hope that when my kids grow up and experience culture shock of their own, they can understand why I have educated them the way I have, and that they feel that I have done the right thing for them. Only time will tell.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Historicism
I started exploring modern philosophy about a year ago, trying to find out if there is some alternative to the nihilism that is dominant in intellectual circles and now in the larger culture as well. As I stated over on the Geopoliticus forum, the Friesian school of philosophy has met all of my philosophical expectations, even as it leaves me necessarily unsatisfied. One of the main points of this philosophical system is that there are limits to provable knowledge, which to many, including myself, seems intuitively true. Once we accept that, we have to accept the fact that we will never be able to win an argument against someone who does not accept that point of view, because we cannot build a logical system on unknowable first principles. We simply cannot compete with pure rationalism, though that fact does not say anything one way or another about the validity of our belief system. There really is no point in even having a discussion with a pure rationalist, since the entire Friesian system of metaphysics is invalidated by their insistence on an entirely internal consistent set of axioms and proofs. The issues and contradictions inherent in their own belief system are glossed over, of course.
What I find interesting is that the Friesian system of philosophy leads somewhat naturally toward a traditionally conservative system of political and social belief. Once we assert (without proof) that morality exists and that the Judeo-Christian version of morality is more-or-less correct, we are led down the path toward advocating traditional liberalism, self-determination of peoples, and a general concept of freedom.
Lately, I’ve been reading the political and social philosophers that fleshed out the political implications of the Friesian philosophers. These men mostly wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, usually directly in opposition to foreign fascism or communism, and frequently also in recognition of the significant socialist turn of American and British society of that same era. F. A. Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, warned the British people in 1944 that the Naziism they were fighting was a natural evolution of the socialist society they were asking for themselves. What I am reading now, The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper, takes a more theoretical bent, and tries to break down into several broad categories the basic theories of societal evolution, while focusing on the implications of each.
Popper’s main division of social theories is into those he calls historicism, and those he calls social engineering.
The historicists are those that believe that societal evolution has an inevitability to it - societies evolve predictably from one thing to another, and there isn’t anything we can do about it. His main example is Plato and his Republic, where a city’s government starts like the “form”, or idealized case, of a government, and slowly degenerates into progressively more corrupt institutions. Interestingly enough, Plato saw this de-evolution progressing from the rule of philosopher-kings, to a communist hereditary aristocracy, to a wealth-driven oligarchy, to democracy, to tyranny, with Plato ranking the relative goodness of these forms of government by how closely they corresponded to his ideal government, the original enlightened despotism ruled by philosopher-kings. As you can see, Plato didn’t think much of democracy. He much preferred the rule of those he considered better prepared to lead from an intellectual and educational perspective, and he advocated strict class divisions to make certain that the rule of the upper class was secure against incursions by the masses. He was advocating a government like Sparta over that of Athens, a rigid military dictatorship as opposed to a reasonably open democracy. By our modern liberal standards, this sounds like a recipe for oppression. In fact it was, as Plato called for in essence a caste system, with the lower castes oppressed as a matter of principle. He is clearly using a different standard of value in evaluating these political systems than what we believe in today.
Popper’s writings on historicism were largely aimed at the Marxists and other socialists of his day, who loudly and repeatedly declared that just as Darwin’s theory proved that more simple species evolved into more complex and “better” species, societies evolve from capitalism to a better, more advanced form of government in socialism. Socialism isn’t just a good idea, it is an inevitable evolution into something greater. In that case, those who stand in the way are not only fools, but are also nefarious advocates of a by-gone era, desperately trying to preserve the privileges of those who unfairly exploited others under capitalism. Popper’s intent was to show that socialism is not inevitable, and that claims that it is inevitable are merely attempts to marginalize the classical liberal opponents of socialism.
What’s interesting to me about the whole argument is how Popper’s arguments about the invalidity of historicism impact not just the leftists that claim a historical inevitability for socialism, but also those on the right who feel there is a historical inevitability about other things. Many conservatives feel that there is a certain historical inevitability regarding the progression of government as well, similar to Plato’s, as despotism becomes formalized in a monarchy, monarchies are replaced by democracies, democracies eventually become socialist, which then degenerate back into despotism of some form. I myself believe that it is very natural for a young, ambitious upstart culture to explode onto the world stage, only to become decadent and fall apart as wealth and complacency replace the previous drive and ambition. There are lots of examples from history that follow this trend. Other examples of non-leftist historicism come in the form of a belief in historic cycles. For example, in Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings, by Ralph Adams Cram, it is stated without proof that history ebbs and flows in five-hundred year cycles. The validity of this claim, as well as the distinction between it being a general rule rather than a curiosity, is left up to the reader to determine. Given all of this, I was honestly surprised to see a blanket condemnation of historicism from Popper.
Like most other extremely general statements, I think Popper’s claims are generally true, except for the inevitable exceptions. I think Popper, in aiming at Marxism, may have cast his net too widely in condemning historicism. On the other hand, I haven’t finished the book yet, so there may be some qualifying statements later on. I suspect that Popper’s intent may have been simply to condemn historicism as a political motivator, rather than to deny the existence of historical patterns in the evolution of societies. Whether he will make that point explicitly at some point is yet to be determined.
Popper’s other main division of social theory, that of social engineering, is further subdivided into utopian social engineering and practical social engineering. Social engineers all believe that society is changing and that the future is malleable, in great contrast with historicism, but they disagree on what our goals should be and on how that change should be managed. Utopian social engineers, like the Russian, Chinese, and Cambodian communists, believed that society can be torn down and rebuilt to make it better in some way. Most of us are familiar with how that usually turns out. Popper doesn’t have much nice to say about these folks. Practical social engineers, the only branch in this scheme that Popper supports, are the conservatives of the world. All changes are analyzed carefully to determine what the likely effect of those changes are, and the changes are only supported if they represent a net positive to society. Some modern liberals would claim to fall in this category as well, but usually their proposals hinge upon being able to educate man into some better version of himself, therefore making possible a society and government that is impossible today. Sounds suspiciously like utopianism to me. I may be reading a bit into Popper here in equating practical social engineering with conservatism, as he hasn’t fully fleshed out the concept as he sees it. However, his introduction to the topic immediately made me think that this is what he meant.
In any case, I’m finding the whole concept interesting and enlightening, especially as Popper focuses much on Plato and his criticism of Greek society, helping to fill another gap in my knowledge. I would recommend to anyone interested in how we got to where we are today do a survey of early twentieth century philosophy and economics writings. Hayek, Popper, and Nock are great places to start, and I’m going to hit von Mises one of these days as well. I find it interesting that today many of these writers are considered libertarians - Samizdata.net even has Popper in its masthead. I think that is partially because conservatism has evolved to some extent to mean something involving religion, as opposed to bring a purely political concept. All of these authors, though modern libertarians have claimed them as their own, have much to say to any secular conservative interested in political theory and history.
