Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Changes

Thus Franklin Delano Roosevelt accepted the presidential nomination of the Democratic party in 1932.  Thus began a fundamental change in how the people of this country chose to govern themselves.

It is usually misleading to pick an event out of history and claim it to be a turning point, in that all that went before was one way, and all that came after was something else.  In reality, the flow of history is much more continuous.  We just don’t see that continuity in the trivia-based analysis of history that most if us have been taught.

The New Deal was an evolutionary result of the political thought that came before, not something revolutionary.  The Progressive Era, usually pegged to the early 1900s, introduced the idea to the American populace that significant government involvement in the free-market economy was a beneficial thing.  Injustices could be righted, wealth could be equitably distributed, the neglected could be cared for, and intelligent people, far more intelligent than your average joe, could be recruited to make the important decisions and run the economy from above.  As the American people blamed the excesses of the capitalists in the 1920s for the hardships of the depression in the 1930s, these ideas resonated with the American people, and they elected Roosevelt in a landslide in 1932.  With this mandate he instituted his relief agenda, fundamentally different from anything that had come before.

In 1936, Republican opposition to the New Deal remained strong.  Alf Landon, the Republican presidential nominee, was quoted in Time magazine as saying:

The fundamental legitimacy of the New Deal was still being questioned as being in opposition to the American ideal of personal liberty.

Landon lost the 1936 election in one of the most lopsided elections in American history.

By 1952, when the Republican party was finally able to break the dominance of the Democrats, the programs and ideas of the New Deal were tacitly accepted by the moderates that controlled the Republican party.  It was well recognized that in order to have some chance at taking power, running against the sentiments of the majority of Americans was pure folly.

Never again was there a serious effort to go back to the pre-New Deal era.  Never again would the Republican party advocate the real repeal of the excessive regulation, harmful economic intervention, and blatant wealth redistribution that had been a result of the Roosevelt era.  America had changed, in very fundamental ways.

Today we live with the legacy of these changes.  Those ideas of the New Deal have been abused to an extent that may have appalled Roosevelt and the liberals of his time.  Landon and his compatriots can sit back and say “I told you so”.  However, as the status quo is what the people want, that is what they will get.  Warts and all.

Are we on the verge of seeing the changing attitudes of the American people being reflected in yet another major shift to the left in moderate Republican policy?

In recent decades, moderate Republicans have fairly consistently espoused views along the lines of a strong national defense, free trade, controlled immigration, anti-gun control, anti-abortion, lower taxes, smaller government, etc.  Those of us who are of a conservative bent can usually find ourselves agreeing at least in broad strokes with the central ideas put forth by these candidates.

When I look at the Republican candidates that are leading in the polls for the 2008 presidential election, I see candidates that are leaving some of these issues behind, in very significant ways.  Despite assurances that New York is different from the rest of the country, it is quite clear that there is a great philosophical divide on gun control for example, and that common ground on this issue is unlikely to be reached.  Given the philosophical divide on this and other issues, can we trust this man?  I don’t know.

More worrisome to me is that the consensus candidate, the moderate, the center of our side of the political spectrum, has shifted to someone with philosophical differences so great from that of conservatives.  I fear that the trend will only continue, and that we will be left further and further behind.

We will do what we can, and we will fight the good fight.  However, in the end the masses rule this country, and we will bow to their will.  We can only hope to be a strong positive influence in that process.  I hope it is enough.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Economism

In his essay The Disadvantages of Being Educated, Albert Jay Nock makes the following observation about the character of American civilization:

Is our nation really obsessed with money?  Nock thinks so.  He found it so distasteful that he spent much of his time in Europe.

Nock traveled and wrote in the early twentieth century, before the industrial revolution had thoroughly taken hold in all of Europe.  Much of rural France was still only marginally industrialized, and Portugal was the same.  Nock watched how the process of industrialization not only increased the prosperity of a populace, but also changed the cultures of these countries.

As he watched the process of industrialization and traveled back and forth between America and Europe, he noted and lamented the obsession of the American populace with money and goods.  He felt that industrialization was a driving force, but it is also likely that the unique characteristics of America, the open culture, more-or-less free economy, and huge amounts of unclaimed natural resources, disproportionately attracted individuals with this mindset.  I am not certain that he developed the term, but he called it economism.

In contrast, Nock observed that the pre-industrial people of rural Europe led simple happy lives, taking real joy in food, music, art, and companionship.  Significant elements of this culture remained even in the urban areas.  Later in life, Nock felt more at home in Brussels than in America.  However, as industrialization took hold, this simple virtuous life that he felt to be so noble slowly became displaced by economism.

Another quote from Nock, this time from Memoirs of a Superfluous Man:

As Nock points out, economism does have it’s benefits.  It is good to be rich, prosperous, and powerful, in that these things allow for self-determination on the world stage.  A wide-diffusion of material well-being reduces hardship on an individual level, with less hunger, better health, and more leisure time.

However, Nock sees it as a losing proposition, in that society becomes too ugly to stand even itself.  There is ample evidence for this in our modern society.  Increasing wealth for the masses means competition to sell things to the masses, with the corresponding race to the lowest common denominator of taste.  Quality music, art, and literature are all but eliminated, replaced by the Spice Girls, abstract meaningless garbage, and trash novels.  The joy of good food is replaced by the convenience of the microwave.  Conversation devolves to mindless sitcoms and football games, with intellectual discourse being rare.  Internal anti-Americanism is rampant, self-destructive policies are proposed daily, and our welfare state has been set on a course doomed to spectacular failure.

This time from Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy, by Thomas Sowell:

It is clear in reading this passage that Sowell is referring to those among us who would make policy without an understanding of economics.  We are all familiar with the activist mindset, where refusing to throw money at every problem is labeled as insensitive cold-hearted greed, when frequently is it merely an insistence on money being used wisely to solve problems in efficient and effective ways.

However, this passage struck me as interesting in the context of Nock’s view on economism.  Nock doesn’t disapprove of economics in the sense of ignoring economic principles while pursing some goal, but he most certainly does disapprove of the cultural implications of Sowell’s world.  Sowell’s entire book is an exposition on free markets, maximizing efficiency, and increasing material well-being.  Not once in the three-hundred and some pages I have read are any cultural implications of this philosophy considered.  It is entirely possible that Sowell has opinions on this subject and considered them to be outside the scope of the book.  However, the tone of the book leads me to think that Sowell advocates a completely dispassionate maximization of efficiency and income, cultural implications be damned.

I suspect that Sowell would see Nock’s view of the economy as needlessly constrained by “non-economic values”, and Nock would see Sowell’s view as a true but sadly out-of-context picture of a free economy.

I find it hard to pass judgement on our culture as Nock has, and I suspect the truth is somewhere in between Nock and Sowell.  Nock saw industrialization and the subsequent slide of a culture into economism as unambiguously harmful in that the soul of a culture is destroyed and replaced with frivolity and meaninglessness.  Sowell implies that maximized efficiency in an economy is an unambiguous good, in that higher standards of living result in better, longer, more comfortable lives.  Really, they are both right.

As a culture, I think that the change from Nock’s quiet, peaceful, beautiful world to Sowell’s driving, efficient, industrial world is inevitable.  A culture is made up of individuals, and each individual, given an opportunity to acquire more material wealth and thus an easier life, is likely to make that choice.  It is only when large numbers of individuals make that choice, and simultaneously make the choice to leave behind the ideals that Nock espouses, that the slide from Nock’s world to Sowell’s world happens.

However, regardless of the choices of the rest of our society and culture, we as individuals have a choice of where on that spectrum of Nock to Sowell to place ourselves.  As the rest of society forgets about real literature, art, and music, we should make a choice to slow down, recapture these things, and preserve them for the future.

Sowell’s world is not all bad, just as Nock’s world is not all good.  By intelligent thoughtful living and meaningful choices, we can get the best of both worlds.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Ignorance

Whenever I see something by Mark Steyn, I’m always interested.  His essays on demographic trends are particularly fascinating.  This is an excerpt from an article of his that I found via Instapundit:

He’s right.  You can’t have a real discussion with the Bushitler types.  His contention though is that these people are dominating the political debate, and that this is a new thing in American politics - a gulf big enough, paradigms so fundamentally different, that there is little point in debate since both sides simply talk past one another.

I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who asks questions like “who was the best/worst US president” or says something like “invading Iraq was probably the worst thing we as a country ever did.” Really?  So where does Millard Fillmore fall on the good/bad scale?  How about James Polk?  How did the occupation of the Philippines compare to the occupation of Iraq?

We have a profound ignorance of our own history.  I’ve tried to fill gaps in my own learning, and I’ve discovered exactly how hard it can be.  I feel that I don’t truly “know” an era, until I understand not just the names, dates, and events, but also the people, their personalities, their motivations, the culture, and how all of those things fit into the national and even global context of the times.  It’s a big undertaking, for ONE era.  How can I make a judgment about the relative worth of one recent president, when I know very little about presidents that served as recently as when I was a child?

For this reason, I’m skeptical any time I read about how suddenly the opposition is more shrill, more unreasonable, more divisive than ever before.  How about during the implementation of the New Deal?  A little research shows the events of the time - the implementation of various New Deal programs, Republican opposition, and Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.  That’s valuable information, but how much do we know about the mood of the country at the time?  We know there was fierce opposition to some of these things.  Was the political climate more or less divisive than today?

History repeats itself.  The famous quote by George Santayana goes “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” This is true, but I think it leaves out a fundamental and important point - mankind will always forget it’s history, and therefore is always doomed to repeat it.

Pretending that what is happening now is somehow special, new, or different is just a trick to sell newspapers.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Short-term Gain, Long-term Loss

In the most recent issue of City Journal, there is a very interesting article about how health care and health insurance are changing with increasingly advanced technology.

The gist of the article is that now that we’ve pretty much conquered infectious disease, there is not a whole lot of randomness left in health care expenditures.  With tuberculosis, polio, etc gone, the risk factors associated with health insurance payouts are completely different from in the past.  Sure, you’ve still got car accidents and kids falling out of trees, but much more prevalently you’ve got obesity and high cholesterol caused by lifestyle choices.

Insurance is, at a basic economic level, a way to pool and mitigate risk.  Getting patched up after a car accident or getting cancer treatment are expensive things, potentially expensive enough to bankrupt the average family.  If these events strike at random, it is economically advantageous for people to pool their money to pass the economic risk of expensive treatments to an insurance company.

However, once randomness is largely removed and health care payouts are mostly driven by choices made by individuals, insurance becomes a whole different ballgame.  If companies are allowed to assign risks properly, those risky lifestyle choices can be determined up front, and people with higher expected health care payouts can be charged more in premiums.  As the risks become better and better known, the pricing becomes more and more focused, reducing the incentive to buy insurance in the first place.  If your insurance premiums are equal or nearly equal to your expected health care expenditures, what’s the point?

This is where the state steps in, with mandatory risk pooling.  You may not be aware of it, but in most states there is a fairly rigorous review process in which state departments of insurance review rating plans before they are put into effect.  The intent is to make sure that the rates are fair and are not unduly discriminatory.  Of course, the definitions of “fair” and “discriminatory” are often politically motivated.  States can and have mandated rates below the costs to the company in a state, resulting in companies largely refusing to sell insurance in those states.  An example is Florida, where homeowners insurance companies are few and far between, with the state has set up a semi-private company, fueled by tax dollars, to take up the slack.

If at some point mandatory risk pooling enters the health insurance market on a large scale in the form of nationalized health care, the populace will be split into two broad categories all being charged the same premiums - those who live healthy lifestyles and thus have low expected costs, and those who live unhealthy lifestyles and thus have high expected costs.  Clearly there are not two discrete categories, but really it is a continuum.  In any case, some people are being forced to pay the self-inflicted costs of other people.

The author of this article argues that healthy people will not stand for this, and that such medical advancements, removing random risk components and emphasizing lifestyle choices as risk components, mean the end of socialized medicine.  I wish I could agree.

For healthy lifestyle people, the argument against socialized medicine as forced risk pooling appeals to their self-interest.  However, I don’t see this argument standing out amongst the other economic mumbo-jumbo and general feel-good garbage that surrounds socialized medicine strongly enough to convince even the people that lose money on the deal.  The unhealthy lifestyle contingent largely benefits from the scheme, in that someone else is footing the bill for their health care, so I wouldn’t anticipate any major objection of their part. 

Fundamentally, one side stands to gain, and the other side isn’t economically sophisticated enough to understand that they are going to get screwed.  Either that, or they’ve bought into the socialist mindset to the point that they don’t care that they are being screwed.  In either case, I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion.

This, and other things I’ve read recently have got me thinking about how economic incentives and political incentives are intertwined in our system of government.  Individuals have every incentive to use the government to take money from their neighbor, and politicians have every incentive to cater to this trend.  Add to that the fact that politicians generally only have only short-term goals in mind, winning the next election, knowing very well that someone else will likely have to deal with any long-term negative effects of legislation passed today.  This is why the insolvent social security system is kept limping along, and very likely no serious attempt will be made to fix it until collapse is imminent.  It is only under these circumstances that socialized medicine can be seriously proposed as a solution to our health care problems.

Is there any way our political system could be restructured to remove these incentives to short-term gain having precedence over long-term loss?  The ideal case is that the populace has sufficient wisdom to elect leadership with sufficient wisdom to make the right choices for the long-term.  However, it is pretty clear that this is not the situation in which we find our country.  One possibility is that a populace that lacks such wisdom will find a way to screw up any system of government, so the best option is one that delays the damage for the longest amount of time.  Is that the state of our political system now, or could something be changed to improve it?

Friday, October 19, 2007

Friction

I never really took the time to understand unemployment benefits until recently, when an acquaintance was fired, applied for benefits, had the application contested, and was eventually awarded the benefits.  These events were my inspiration to educate myself about the process.

I’ve long felt that there is an inherent asymmetry in the employer/employee relationship, not necessarily from a legal perspective, but from a social one.  Employees want stability, so they create in their minds a presumed commitment from their employer, where none really exists.  I’m too young to be familiar with the days when one expected to have one employer for one’s entire working lifetime.  People my age expect to hop jobs periodically.  However, among older generations and even among a significant portion of mine, many people really just want a secure future.

From what I can tell, employers prey on this expectation.  They know it exists, and they do their best to preserve the illusion of stability, since that illusion boosts morale.  Similarly, employees are expected to give two weeks notice when leaving a company, but no such burden falls on the employer.  Clearly the two week notice standard is not legally required, but from what I can tell, it is a social nicety whose violation will follow an employee via references.  What I am seeing, though, is an increase in legal protections for employers, in the form of documents required to be signed annually by employees stating that the employee is aware that at-will employment means they can be fired at any time for any reason.

All of this leaves a bad taste in my mouth, in that employers tend to hold employees to a different standard than that to which they hold themselves.

What I have found interesting in my research on unemployment insurance is exactly how not free the market is.  We all know at least anecdotally about employment law in European countries, where it is virtually impossible to fire someone, so they don’t really bother hiring anyone either, resulting in unemployment rates that are typically at least double what is common in America.  It isn’t difficult to fire someone in America, but there certainly are significant disincentives.

In my acquaintance’s case, she had a medical condition that required frequent doctor visits and occasional days off to rest.  She used all of her vacation time, all of her allotted doctor’s visit time, all of her sick time, all of her FMLA time, and then continued to take time off as she felt it necessary.  The company was not pleased, and eventually found reason to dismiss her.  This was entirely justified, given that they were getting very little work out of her while keeping space and equipment idle awaiting her return.

Unemployment law states that in order to collect benefits, one’s dismissal must be at no fault to one’s self.  The wording makes it clear that it was aimed at layoffs at a factory, for example, where workers are idled because of over-production.  In this case, even with a very generous reading of the law, I could see no way my acquaintance would be eligible for unemployment benefits.

However, she applied for them anyway.  Her application was challenged, she appealed, and she won.  I was not privy to any of the legal proceedings, so I do not know exactly what transpired.

The fact that she ended up getting benefits tells me a couple things.  It is entirely possible that the company made a purely financial decision that it is cheaper to pay the unemployment benefits than to fight them in court.  That raises a whole different issue of legal costs that are spiraling out of control, making it cheaper to feed the welfare state than to fight the welfare state in court.  The other possibility is that the company fought and lost, meaning the court proceedings were entirely biased against the employer.

In either case, it struck me that even in America, there is significant disincentive to remove people from jobs.  Possible reasons for such removal include lack of need for that particular job, an individual being inappropriate for a position, or an individual being incompatible with a company’s philosophy or management style.  In my state, an employer could easily end up paying nearly $10 an hour, full-time for the better part of a year, to an employee that no longer provides any service whatsoever to the company.  If an employee is hired that misrepresented themselves to the company, unless such misrepresentation was grossly negligent, the company is stuck with that person unless they are willing to in effect, buy out their contract.

Success in business requires efficiency.  A company must be good at something, better in fact than its competitors.  I suppose if a drag on that efficiency is applied equally across a broad spectrum of the economy there is no unfairness (in the competitive sense), but still, I wonder at the real cost of the friction applied to the economy in this way.  It seems to be a boon to the few at the expense of the many, as are most welfare state programs.

As with most distortions to the free-market, the first place I look for analysis is how such distortions change my own behavior.  I see myself being much more unwilling to give someone a chance, as someone who is marginally qualified but promising has a greater chance of failure than someone whose resume indicates a better fit.  There are a variety of reasons why I might be willing to take on someone less qualified, but they all pale in comparison to the fact that if it doesn’t work out, I’m stuck with the person.

I am aware of the problems with a pure free market system, but that is where my bias always lies, as the benefits clearly outweigh the costs in free (or mostly free) market economies.  Unemployment insurance is one of those places where I think there are unintended negative consequences that far outweigh any positive, except to the person that is now entitled to live off a company without working for weeks on end.  Such things are often the result of living in a democracy.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Independence

A lot of people that feel the call to work the land, including myself, have a romantic notion about what this lifestyle entails.  Many of us think back to a simpler time when you loaded up your family in a covered wagon, drove west until you found unoccupied land, staked a claim, and got busy making a life for yourself.  It appeals to our sense of self-reliance and independence, our desire to tame the wild and to create something out of nothing.  If only we could get back to that simpler time....

The problem is, that’s not actually how it was.  It’s taken a concerted effort on my part to educate myself about the reality of the situation, and to face that reality rather than to work toward a dream that never really existed.

The Little House on the Prairie series of books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, recounts the experiences of the author’s life in the late 1800s, from growing up in the woods of Wisconsin, to being among the first settlers in Oklahoma Territory, through several subsequent moves finally ending in South Dakota.  It is a fascinating recollection of the times, written for children but informative enough that adults find value in it too.

The first eight books of the series were written by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  The ninth was compiled after her death, built from her notes.  It is in reading this book that one gets a sense that the all previous books in the series have been sanitized, to make them more palatable for popular consumption.  In the first eight books of the series, the reader learns about scary but largely harmless run-ins with bears, panthers, Indians, locusts, and harsh winters.  Illnesses are mentioned but largely glossed over.  Even when scarlet fever causes Laura’s sister to go blind, it is merely a challenge to met and overcome by the good-natured family.  In the final book, set in South Dakota after Laura has gotten married, we learn of dysentery crippling her husband, her infant son dying from an unknown illness, and three straight years of crop failures causing near bankruptcy.  After having the harsh reality laid out explicitly in this book, it is much easier to read between the lines in the rest of the series.

Life on the frontier was not easy.  One gets the impression that even then there was a romantic vision of what life on the frontier was like.  If memory serves me, in order for a family to secure their ownership of a land claim, they had to live on the claim for the majority of each year for each of five consecutive years and they had to raise a significant crop in three of those five years.  A huge fraction of people failed and went back east.  However, a flood of people from the east seeing the opportunity for wealth immediately took their places.  Many who did succeed lived in squalor and hardship as they scraped a living out of an unknown land.  As more and more people moved in, even the wild sources of food, game and edible wild plants, were driven out or consumed.

Within fifty years of it’s settlement, the entire area would be devastated by the droughts and windstorms of the 1930’s, a consequence of heavy settlement and tillage in an ecosystem and climate not exactly suitable for the farming techniques that the settlers brought with them.  The white man was completely new to the area, and had no institutional knowledge of how to live in their new surroundings.  There is a reason the region never became densely populated by Indians.

Neither were the settlers truly independent.  Independence from one another was not even on their minds.  They helped each other build houses, took care of each other’s families and livestock during times of illness, and pooled food stores in times of scarcity.  Dependence on imported goods was a fact of life, including machinery and parts, lumber, and food.

All of this, as well as this post by Kim and the subsequent comments, have made me reevaluate what I mean by saying I want to be independent.  True self-sufficiency in our modern world is incredibly difficult to accomplish, if one intends to maintain something resembling our current standard of living.  Look at fuel, or example.  For transportation, one could conceivably produce one’s own fuel by growing grain and distilling ethanol.  However, that requires land, a tractor that also runs on ethanol, equipment, spare parts for that equipment, and a tremendous amount of time.  Heating one’s home could likewise be done with wood, if one has the time and is willing to put up with the inefficiencies.  Electrical independence is likewise possible with a proper water, solar, or wind apparatus… until something breaks.

The independence I desire is less than that.  Certain aspects, such as food independence, are driven by the great expense of acquiring food produced by others that is up to our standards.  Other aspects, like haying with horses, is driven by the inability to hire someone reliable to do the job for us, and the simple economic fact that horses are cheaper and easier to maintain on a small acreage than a tractor.  Still others, like the strong desire to be self-employed and out of debt, come out of my desire to be beholden to no one.

What I don’t expect to do it learn to smelt, cast, and machine to make my own mower blades.  Among other things.

Individuals in our economy learn to specialize, because there is much to be gained by doing so.  I have skills and equipment that allow me to produce item X with less effort than you can, so you trade me item Y that you produce more efficiently than I can, for item X.  We both gain.

Several things push me to buck this specialization trend somewhat, to make investments in equipment and time to do and produce many different things.  Two related items are my enjoyment of a wide variety of work and a rather low monetary value on my leisure time, thus making me more willing to spend my own time to produce certain things rather than paying someone else to do it for me.  Rather than being a pure economic calculation, I weight certain processes toward doing things myself because of a non-economic factor - the enjoyment I get from doing it.  Another is the fact that items of the quality that my family insists upon, particularly food items, are luxuries in our current marketplace, meaning the price is high and there is even more economic incentive for me to produce those things myself.

Not everyone is going to make the same decisions I am, because some people would rather watch football than till their garden, and others would rather change the brake pads in their car than mend a fence.  None of these choices are wrong.

One thing that has frustrated me for a long time, though reading Little House on the Prairie and other books have tempered it somewhat, is the fact that land prices have been driven up to the point that supporting a family via cash farming is virtually impossible on a small scale.  Simple economics dictate that once industrialization takes hold, commodity prices adjust to the level of the new most efficient method of production.  Therefore, anyone unable to farm thousands of acres with equipment costing in the hundreds of thousands of dollars is unable to compete.  Rightly so, if that method of production is creating a product that is in demand.

To me, farming comes with many non-economic benefits to one’s lifestyle.  I want my children to grow up in a rural environment, minimally exposed to the pressures of pop culture, and heavily exposed to the virtues of hard work and the fruits of one’s labor.  The economics of that lifestyle do not drive that decision, but they do remain as constraints.  We must still be able to feed, clothe, and house ourselves.

Between population growth and rising incomes due to families with two working parents, land prices have risen dramatically.  With industrialization, farm commodity prices have fallen dramatically.  The combination of these things have made it extremely difficult for a small farmer to make a living on their land.  I suppose in aggregate nothing has really changed, as it was never easy to make a living off the land, we just face different challenges now than what people used to face.  I’ve heard it said that one can either pay a mortgage or a salary on a small farm, but not both.  I can say that in my experience this is true, as the only people I’ve seen with even moderate success making a small farm work are people that have inherited land, thus eliminating the mortgage expense.  Even then, they have to be willing to live within extremely limited means for a very long time.  Possibly permanently.

The ultimate dream of independence held by many people that want to get back to the land may be modeled on something that never was and likely never will be for all but a few exceptionally lucky or skilled individuals.  The first step in making peace with the world is to understand how one’s expectations conflict with reality.  The second step is to take the good and leave the bad, to accept reality as it is, and to adjust one’s expectations.  I’m working on it.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Biography

When I was growing up, I had a great love for classical music.  Until my teenage years, it was really the only music to which I had been exposed, with the exception of some very tame older pop music that my parents liked.  My favorite composer was Beethoven, but I wasn’t sophisticated enough at the time to really understand why I liked his music.

As I grew older, I began to understand how very little classical music I was familiar with.  I was familiar with a decent amount of Beethoven’s music, a few well-known pieces from other composers, but I knew very little of anything obscure or less popular.  I decided to set out on a mission to educate myself.  My wife has a rather large collection of classical CDs, so I grabbed a few from names I knew and began to listen to them.

Sturgeon’s Law is a principle that has been around for a few decades. In it’s original form, it asserts that “90% of science fiction is crap”.  Corollaries to this law state that this is not unusual, for “90% of everything is crap.” I have long believed this to be true, even before I was aware that the principle had been encapsulated in a law.  Books, movies, music, magazines, newspapers, art, sculpture - the form of media or art does not matter, 90% of it is guaranteed to be crap.

I was shocked to discover that this law also transcends time - 90% of classical music is also crap.  Even within the repertoires of the great composers, far more bad or mediocre music was written than good stuff.

A few things occurred to me.  First, I was fascinated that this law appears to apply to all media, regardless of it’s form, intended audience, method of “consumption”, era of creation, etc.  Yet another way in which nothing fundamental about mankind ever changes - only the context in which we live changes.  Second, I realized that “the classics” are classics because they were the few pieces that rose above the din, to shine and be admired purely on their own merits.  To have created one of these pieces results in one’s name being remembered for centuries.  To have created multiple pieces of this caliber ensures immortality.  To have created none guarantees that like the vast majority of artists and musicians, one’s name will be erased from history as just another face in the crowd.

My favorite musical form has always been the symphony.  In the course of my study of classical music, it occurred to me that I was not even familiar with all of the symphonies written by my favorite composer, so I thought that was an excellent thing to explore.  I began to listen to Beethoven’s symphonies, in order.

I was shocked at how mediocre the first few were.  Even the famous third, Eroica, didn’t do much for me.  It felt to me as if Beethoven was learning the ropes, imitating his predecessors - Mozart mostly.  He seemed to be learning the symphonic form, which in itself is no small feat.  Musically, however, there was nothing that really struck me as great.

Then came the fifth, and everything changed.

As cliche as the fifth has become, it is still one of my favorite pieces of music of all time.  Almost everyone is familiar with the theme of the first movement - short-short-short-long - and yet, hardly anyone is familiar with the rest of the piece.  The power, the passion, and the majesty of it give me chills just thinking about it.  From a musical perspective, it was completely different from what came before, in it’s lack of restraint and it’s emotional depth.  From a personal perspective, it almost feels as if some event cracked the floodgates of tradition and restraint in Beethoven’s mind, and this is what rushed forth - anger, then peace, then elation and triumph, put to music in a revolutionary way.  The wonder of it is that it is so coherent, so powerful, and so masterfully put together in symphonic form.  I feel that it is in this work that Beethoven broke from the past and matured as a composer.  I suspect that it is also around this time that he matured as a man.  Not physically, but mentally and emotionally.

The sixth, the Pastorale, contains many themes familiar to anyone who grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons.  It consists of five movements, each about an event in country life.  It is fun, it is interesting, and it appears to be a playful study of what could be done with his new-found musical freedom and creativity.  It is nice music without the depth of the fifth, an yet it still exemplifies a break from the past.

The seventh, my favorite after the fifth, brings back some of the majesty of the fifth, while still being a unique and engaging piece.  It is proof that at this point in his life, he’s still got it.

The eight is unremarkable to me, seemingly the creation of someone producing because they are supposed to produce, riding on the laurels of their former greatness.

The ninth and final symphony, arguably the most famous, is fascinating to me.  Many people know this symphony as the Ode to Joy, while being unaware that the Ode to Joy comprises only a small fraction of this rather long piece.  When writing the ninth, Beethoven was a fairly old man, and was likely completely deaf.  You can tell.  The majority of the symphony is long-winded, somewhat unstructured, and a bit more atonal than his earlier work.  Like the ramblings of an old deaf guy put to music.  And then the Ode begins, and it’s like a moment of lucidity, spectacular in what it reveals about the man underneath, both in terms of musical greatness as well as in the passion and zest this man possessed.

Not too long before going through this exercise, I read an essay by Albert Jay Nock called “The Purpose of Biography” (found in The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticism).  In it, Nock asserts that the only legitimate purpose of biography is to help the historian, and that too many biographies are written now simply to “acquaint the public, often with great overemphasis, with a variety of matters which not only are void of historical significance, but also are preeminently none of the public’s business.” That is, the personal details of one’s life are no one’s business but one’s own, and these details have no place in a biography of any quality.  Voyeuristic biography intended for the masses is something else entirely.  The real purpose of biography is to analyze a person’s life in the context of their times and the contributions they have made to a given field.

To some extent, I felt as if Beethoven’s symphonies were a biography of his life, in many different ways.  In Nock’s meaning of biography, by being purely a study in the evolution of music at all scales - within a single composition, in the context of other Beethoven works, and in the context of other great composers.  In the modern meaning of biography, in that I feel certain information about his life can be deduced from his compositions.  And in yet another way, where the evolution of his mental state, deducible from his music, is a study of the psychology of men, both great and ordinary.

It is entirely possible that I am all wrong about my conclusions, for I do not know the details of Beethoven’s life well enough to say.  However, I suspect there is at least a grain of truth to them, and I find it very interesting that such things can be guessed at both by the music itself, and the character of each symphony within the context of the entire set of symphonies.

I come away from it with a profound appreciation of the music and of the man, even greater for the understanding that placing the music in context provides.  History comes to us in many forms, not all of it compiled in a book for easy digestion.  Great artists appear only rarely, we would do well to identify and appreciate them, both for what their art tells us about them, and for what it tells us about the period in which they lived.

Monday, October 08, 2007

Back to the land

There’s been an undeniable movement in the last few decades of “going back to the land”.  I never really knew about it until I had decided to go back to the land myself.

What drives this movement?  Why do people want to go back to the land?  What could possibly make people want to give up the cushy jobs and lifestyles that we’ve worked for thousands of years to achieve?  This year is the first time in history that less than 50% of the world’s population is employed in agriculture.  That’s an undeniably good thing, right?

Unquestionably, it’s been a good thing.  With increasing technology and industrialization, more people are fed with less effort, achieving several things simultaneously.  First and most obviously, more people have more to eat, meaning longer better lives for more people.  Second, more people have time to do other things, like service jobs that increase quality of living for everyone, research things like drugs to further increase quality and length of lives, or even work toward further technological sophistication in the agricultural sector, allowing even more people to come in from the fields.  It’s no wonder world population increases exponentially.  Obviously it should by the very nature of population growth, but only very recently (on a historical time scale) have we really taken the brakes off the growth curve.

Now, people are far more likely to be working in an office, factory, barber shop, grocery store, or something similar than they are to be working in agriculture.  Agriculture has grown to the point that it is truly an industry, in that machines costing a significant fraction of a million dollars do a large portion of the work.  It is not for the faint of heart.

Now that we’re living in unprecedented luxury, with food and leisure time aplenty, why are some people choosing to go back to the land?

There seem to be several camps, mostly splitting into two broad groups.

The first is the “anti” camp.  Anti-consumerism, anti-globalization, anti-industry, etc.  You know the types.  As far as I can tell, their motives are skin deep - simple teenage rebellion taken as a life’s philosophy.  You can identify them by their geodesic domes and patchouli oil.

The second seems a bit more complicated.  I think a significant fraction of mankind is just not built to thrive in a flourescently lit cubicle environment where a completely sedentary job is the norm.

Mankind spent the majority of it’s existence hunting, gathering, or farming.  Labor under the sun was a way of life, and we evolved to fill that role.  As we become sedentary, we get fat, weak, and sickly.  As we stare at computer screens all day we get headaches, achy eyes, and an ever growing need for vision correction of some sort.

That’s what modern life does to the body.  How about the mind?  Rates of depression have skyrocketed in the last few decades.  Evidence of previous underdiagnosis?  Or evidence of some more fundamental problem with our modern lifestyle?  If we were bucking our evolutionary niche, how would that manifest itself?

Clearly not everyone has a problem with office work.  Probably not even a majority of people.  Possibly not even a very significant minority.  But for some, bringing home a paycheck by performing indoor sedentary labor is the fastest way to sap one’s energy and zest for life.  Some people just aren’t happy without a good bit of sweat.

One benefit of our modern lifestyle is that our work is generally productive enough to give us a good amount of leisure time and money.  Those with the itch to go back to the land can usually scratch it with gardening, hobby farms, or weekend horseback riding.  Though not all of us get off so easily.

Monday, October 01, 2007

For what would you risk your life?

Whatever happened to principles important enough that you’d die for them?

It seems that our country has gone through a very interesting change.  At one point, we had large portions of the population that were die hard individualists, and yet would risk their lives to stand up for principles in which they believed.  What did the farmers of the Revolutionary Era have to gain by answering the call to arms?  What did civilians of the Civil War era have to gain by volunteering?  In World Wars I and II, men volunteered to fight and die even when our homeland wasn’t threatened, to preserve something as ethereal as Western Civilization.

Now, it seems we have a rather different situation.  Principles are entirely subjective.  Individualism has been recast - from self-reliance, it has morphed into self-worship.  There is nothing worth dying for, because self-preservation, at any price, is the utmost goal.

I have never been in the military, and I have never been in a situation where I have put myself to the test.  I am very honest about the fact that I don’t know how I’d react under pressure.

About six months ago, I chose to carry a firearm.  Before taking that step, I went through a significant process of self-examination.

Could I shoot and kill someone that threatened my wife and kids?

Not having been formally and consciously in the protector role before, it took a minute, but the decision was unequivocally - yes, I could.

What would I do if someone threatened someone else’s wife and kids in my presence?

The moral answer is obvious.  Of course you act to protect people.  However, I felt that if I chose to carry, I was making myself obligated to intervene in any such situation, even if I risk my own life.  How did I feel about that?

It took a couple days to come to terms with the implications, but the decision again was unequivocally - yes, I would intervene.

Then I took it a step further.  Given the option to legally carry, given the ability to protect not only my family but also the people around me, could I in good conscience choose not exercise that ability?

A few more days of mulling it over resulted in the decision that carrying with the intention of intervening was not just an option, but an obligation.  I know my conscience would never leave me alone if I found myself unable to act decisively, and someone, family or not, was injured or killed.  I must be prepared to protect them, given the option.

I know very well that I am completely untested.  I do my best to train and prepare, but it is very clear in my mind that if a situation actually were to erupt, I have no idea how I would react.  I hope my instincts would be right.  They always have been right in similar situations in the past, so I am hopeful.  But I am not so arrogant as to make promises beforehand.

I was recently in a online discussion about this guy, an old man living in Atlanta who was recently uncovered as a former concentration camp guard.  I am astounded, dismayed, and extremely angered by the response I’m seeing.

Excuses outnumber condemnations by about ten to one.  He was brainwashed.  He had to follow orders.  I’m sure he didn’t actually hurt anyone, he was just a guard and dog trainer.  If he were to question the system, he probably would have been killed.  Can you blame him?  You can’t possibly know what you would have done given those circumstances, so who are you to throw stones?

He was a concentration camp guard.

I am sickened at what our culture has become.

For me to suggest that sometimes it is necessary to risk one’s life to do the right thing gets me heaps of scorn.  Principle is no longer a sufficient motivating force, self-preservation is all that matters.

Absolutely correct - I do not know what I would have done in the circumstances.  The stress would be absolutely undeniable.  But I’m damn sure I couldn’t stand by and watch the torture and cruelty or kill in cold blood .  If I were told “shoot this lady in the head or die”, I couldn’t do it.

And yet.... I’m hearing nothing but excuses for a concentration camp guard.

I fear for the future.

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Take the good, leave the bad

Like many other conservatives, I’ve become quite dismayed at the decline of our culture.  It is evident in many ways - educational standards that have been reduced and refocused on pointless things, the near complete lack of any original art of any value, the slow degradation of moral standards, entertainment that is crude, pointless, and really a thinly veiled vehicle for advertising, etc.  All of these seemingly unrelated things tie together, as results of the glorification of the masses - a lynchpin of the progressive agenda.

That’s not really want I wanted to discuss here.  This is about my reaction to it all.

When I was younger, I knew there was something wrong with our culture, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.  I hated our society, and I wanted no part of it.  I threatened to move into a cave and become a hermit.

As I grew older and more intellectually capable of analyzing the situation, my dismay only grew stronger.  How could people have taken this wonderful thing called America and screwed it up this badly?  And then rabidly call for more of the same, because clearly it isn’t screwed up enough?  Every conservative victory I saw ended up reversed wholly or partially, while creeping socialism infected our government and our culture.

I saw no possible victory, I only saw a slow decline into socialism.  I had to get out.  I investigated other countries, to see if there was some place that would be better for me.  There wasn’t.  A friend and I started making plans to get rich and buy an island somewhere, to live away from the rest of the world.  It was a joke, with a grain of truth at it’s core.

I got to the point where I was stressing myself out, so unhappy was I with the state of the world.  It affected my outlook on everything.

Then, slowly, elements of understanding came together.

I began to understand the inevitability of it all.  I began to understand that if you dig into the annals of history, the cyclic nature of civilizations becomes readily apparent.  I began to understand that individuals that single-handedly influenced the course of history were extremely rare.  Far more often, people of note were merely the embodiment of a movement that took place behind the scenes, the face of something much larger than themselves.  If that particular person hadn’t been involved, the same events would have occurred, with someone else in their place.

Simply, I began to understand that the forces of history are much larger and infinitely more powerful than me, and that raging at them is as futile as raging against a roaring freight train.

This led to several things.  First, an acceptance of my place in the world.  To rage against the world is an act of supreme arrogance, thinking that the world, as big and complicated as it is, even cares what I think.  Second, I no longer felt responsible for changing it - the weight of the world was off my shoulders.

Just as those responsibilities fell away, others took their place.  I felt responsible for preserving the good in the world that has been lost, and passing it on to others and to the next generation.  I felt the obligation to become a custodian of the culture that we are leaving behind.

The one thing that made the most difference - I no longer felt a need to escape.  In my prior analysis of places to live, I learned very quickly that despite all of it’s flaws, America still is by far the best place to be.  Even as our freedoms are compromised and eroded, as more and more of our wealth is confiscated and transferred to others, not only is everywhere else worse in these respects, but only here is there a tradition of freedom and liberty.  That tradition lives on to this day, in individuals that are just as unhappy with the state of our culture as I am.

It was then that I developed a personal philosophy that I’ve applied to many aspects of life - take the good, leave the bad.  I can enjoy the good aspects of America while isolating myself as much as possible from the bad aspects.  If I don’t like the educational system, I will homeschool.  If I don’t like my entertainment options, I’ll ditch the TV and hit the library.  If I don’t like the food options, I’ll grow my own.  If I don’t like the culture, I’ll refuse to participate in it.

I still occasionally get angry when I hear about some particularly stupid or intrusive government proposal, but unless it affects me directly, my ire generally fades much more quickly than it used to.  Take the good leave the bad has brought me a sense of peace that I didn’t know before.  It’s made me much less self-conscious about the decisions I make, as I no longer have any expectations of other people seeing the world the same way I do.  Individuals are largely representatives of the masses, and as such, I have no expectations of anyone having similar values or a similar philosophy to mine.  When I do find someone similar, it’s a rare treat.

Take the good, leave the bad has caused me to refocus my energies.  Rather than being angry at the world, I look more inward, to learning about history, culture, and the humane life, to working toward increasing our independence from mainstream culture, to bringing up children in a completely different environment than most.  I try to expose them to this culture that I appreciate, hoping to instill in them a love for it while they are still young.  This, I think, will be my greatest contribution to the world - children that see modern culture for what it is, and choose something different of their own free will.

That is how change happens.  One person, and one family, at a time.

American Farmer

Search

American Farmer Categories

Friends

• Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
• Bloodletting
• Classical Values
• Eject Eject Eject
• Geek with a45
• Neanderpundit
• Smoke on the Water
• The Spoons Experience
• White Peril

Favorites

• American Digest
• Andrea
• Baby Troll Blog
• Alice Bachini
• Barking Moonbat
• Darlene
• Dr. Helen
• Eternity Road
• Front Page Magazine
• Live From The Guillotine
• One Hand Clapping
• The Passing Parade
• Samizdata
• Smallest Minority

Mainstream

• City Journal
• CNS News
• Insty
• The Weekly Standard

Reference

• Arts and Letters Daily

From the U.S. Constitution...