March 18, 2006

More from Maggie Gallagher here

Here's an excellent piece from Slate that calls into question Whole Foods' organic propaganda. Read it. Then read it again. This is why I say: buy vegetables from your local farmer's market as often as you can.

One thing I quibble with in this piece, though: the idea of a two-tiered food system in this country, one for the rich and another for the poor. I won't pay Whole Foods' prices for vegetables, but if somebody wants to, more power to them. Since when did we start moaning in America about a higher standard of service for people willing and able to pay for it? I can't afford to fly first class, and wouldn't if I could, but if people want to shell out the bucks for it, fine. I can't afford to eat at Delmonico's, but I don't resent those who can and do. So why should I care if people who can afford to pay top dollar for carrots have the opportunity to do so? We are awfully selective in our populism.

Steve writes with some choice words for the homeschool crowd:

The education topic drives me nuts because everybody on the left and right are holding hands in agreement although they don't know it. They all believe in being easy on their kids in one way or another.

I was raised in the lower class in the US. The real lower class. We lived in rented flats for most of my childhood in lower or lower-middle class urban neighborhoods. I attended Catholic schools when they were free to parishioners. We had 50 students per class. These were not the gentle children of good Christian homes in the nostalgic stories. These were the rowdy "Catholic" kids that the nice protestants from the better neighborhoods were afraid of.

While they were largely 2 parent homes, the dads were rarely involved in child rearing. The Dads worked in factories or construction and after work they visited the many taverns before returning home late in the evening. I worked part-time and summers in the factories and in construction and became well acquainted with the life style so I know of what I speak. At most, the Dads served as the court of last resort with a thick belt. Some were brutes who were anxious for such duty but most were reluctant nice guys like my own Dad who ducked the role as much he could. Home however was for women and children.

The kids however exceeded everyone's expectations. When state testing was implemented, we routinely surpassed public schools in better neighborhoods where the parents were mostly college graduates. From homes where most parents never attended high school, most of the kids became college graduates. It is the single greatest instance of upward mobility that the US (and perhaps the world) has ever witnessed.

So how, with largely absent fathers, poorly educated mothers, low socio-economic status and lord of the flies conflict out on the playground was this achieved. Marine boot-camp discipline in the classrooms.

Instead of soft upper middle class housewives who now teach in the public and Catholic schools, we had tough nuns who weren't afraid of putting us in our place. Nobody worried about the self-esteem of troublemakers and nobody was seeing a therapist. Nobody was on psychotropic drugs and in my experience, nobody was kicked out. The ultimate threat however was a call home. Tough as the discipline was in school, nobody wanted a call home because there the discipline was tougher and sharper. No parent wanted their family to be shamed and no kid wanted to pay the price for shaming their family.

I live and work among Asians and my wife teaches in a high school with an overwhelmingly Asian-American student body. In almost all cases, both parents work. When the kids write in their journals about the weekends, they routinely say: "my dad went to work." The kids are disciplined, polite, successful, and devoted to their families. They are accepted into the best public and private universities in the country even though they have none of the alumni privileges and they even face reverse affirmative action to prevent too many Asian students. When they graduate from these elite schools, they return to the family home and work to help themselves and their families. Why? The answer is high expectations, high-investment, family pride, and discipline. The parents work like hell to provide the best opportunities for their children and the kids are very aware of that. They feel obligated to pay back and they love their parents for the very real sacrifices they have made.

The home-schooled kids I've seen from personal relationships and from coaching soccer are too often little hot-housed flowers. They aren't used to taking orders from strangers and they are unskilled in the give and take of peer relationships. This is a particular difficulty for boys who must get used to the tough pecking-order relationships that boys naturally develop and are mirrored in the working world. The parents (mostly mothers) of home schoolers will complain about the discipline and want special treatment for their children. They are more likely than public or private school kids to drop out regardless of their natural athletic ability.

As far as the extra closeness blah, blah, blah. I defy you to find a closer parent-child relationship than I have with my son because I have never see it. Where I can't provide the best for my kids, I have no problem paying people who are more capable and I work like hell to provide that ability. My son goes around without prompting saying: "my life is awesome" and "my life is all about opportunities." He is well aware of where I came from and how hard I worked to move up. I have a saying that we have adopted as our motto: "you stand on my shoulders." I work a more than full-time job and my wife teaches high school. We live and work to provide the best opportunities for our kids and I defy you to find more successful parents than we are.

Bonnie from Texas writes:

I have been reading the home schooling discussion with interest, but nobody has really talked about the actual shape of home schooling, at least not in the first fifteen or so posts. I think people would really be surprised to find that home schoolers have the choice of an incredible number of supports, particularly for secondary students. Of course, I might not have a full pespective, since I live northwest of Houston - also known as Home School Heaven, where many excellent classes are offered as private tutorials for home schoolers. I have been teaching Latin and English (sometimes Logic) to high schoolers for about 10 years. They come to me weekly for lecture, class participation, demonstration, and then they work at home, sometimes submitting work online or receiving graded work online. I am just one of dozens of such teachers in my area. I usually don't get the best writers; those are home with parents who are good writers and good writing teachers. My friend who teaches math often gets the most math-challenged students, since students who are talented in math can fly through excellent video curricula without much help.

If a child has been properly prepared, much of his secondary education is easily self-taught. The student reads and digests the material, usually with just the need for an expertly moderated discussion... sort of on the Oxford model.

I have found that the hilarious fear of missing socialization disappears quickly as parents find out that they don't have to chain their family to the kitchen table and wade through every subject alone. And the more reasonable fear of teaching higher skill subjects fades a bit more slowly as they find the countless opportunities for group learning, online curriculum, and best of all - the fabulous capability of their own well-prepared students to confront, understand, measure, and respond to quite complex ideas as they go along.

This may be jumping the gun on the religion chapter, but since Bruce brought it up and it fits with something I’ve been thinking about, I’ll wade it.

I’ve been thinking about the fundamental disconnect at work in the overblown affrontery expressed by some contributors and emailers in response to some of the criticisms here. I start from a basic assumption that we—all of us—are sinful. It does not strike me as at all outrageous to say that many if not most of the choices we make, my own included, are motivated by love of self above all else; it strikes me simply as a good place to begin. It would not offend me in the least to hear that I do not love what I ought to love because I know my own heart and I know that this is true.

On the other hand, for many if not most, the doctrine of original sin is all but lost. We are all “basically good people.” From this starting point, I can see how many of the comments made here would be terribly offensive. There is much that needs to be said about this as it gets to the core issue which is, ultimately, a spiritual issue. At this juncture though, I just want to make one point. It is this: if we as a society lose sin as a real thing, we also lose redemption, hope, and joy as real things.

Because as Bruce wrote, far from being a “mean and nasty” doctrine that crushes the human spirit, the doctrine of sin is what gives us our dignity as spiritual creatures made in the image of God. Unless we can be sinners we can never be saints. I have written some on this subject elsewhere, especially about the need to preserve the idea of virtuous vices:

The practitioners of virtuous vice are more forgivable because their sins are human sins, pursued with human passions. They approach life with the attitude of "real vice or no vice at all." As such, their vices remain on a human scale. Retaining a high level of skill and daring, these sinners celebrate their humanity by consciously risking annihilation. The virtuous vices are virtuous because they carry within them the seed of redemption: a recognition of the truth that human beings are not merely materialistic beings, not just a collection of elements, but spiritual beings capable of a meaningful annihilation. In George Santayana's memorable phrase, those who practice virtuous vice are "moral, though fugitive." As G.K. Chesterton put it, "they accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly."

… The success of enlightened democracy is also its greatest bane: it imposes onto every area of human life the calculus of utilitarian efficiency. Pornography—I am using the term in its most general sense—is simply the imposition of this calculus on the fact of human sin. It is sin carefully processed, packaged, marketed, shopped for, and stored away in the cupboard, ready to satisfy any late night craving we may have. The attraction of the midnight snack is that it perpetuates the illusion of free and responsible adulthood while all the while allowing us to submit completely to the slavery of desire. The culture of porn is modernity's answer to a Puritan inheritance which declares all men sinners and demands that no man should sin.

… We need virtuous vice and bold sinners. Such vice affirms our humanity and tends to either burn a person up, or burn him into a saint. Outbreaks are violent and ugly, but can usually be contained. The culture of porn, on the other hand, operates like a deadly but patient virus: it lurks in the blood and succeeds by maintaining in its host the illusion of health. It creates simpering, self-justifying, and machine-like sins; outbreaks are prettified, and devastation seeps into society like a water into a sponge, mostly unnoticed.

Far better to concede some hypocrisy as Rod does below (a sentiment I second), or even to celebrate one’s selfishness as a Randian might, than to wallow in a false goodness that in essence, denies us our souls.

March 17, 2006

Angelo's post makes an important point that conservatives of all stripes need to remember--that doom and gloom are too easy and too off-putting--and that points to the transcendent key to Rod's program, and traditional conservatism in general.

It is too easy to fall into the "bad news" mode; and this mode can lead in either of two directions. The first is the preachy, overwrought Jeremiad--we are all going to hell and deserve to because we are weak and selfish. The other is resignation rooted in a partial, overly pessimistic vision of human nature. The second problem is what Crunchy Cons seeks to address, I think. It is the view that the height of wisdom is the recognition that human nature and human reason are limited, that we are guided by our desires and appetites, that our emotions keep us from thinking too rationally, and that therefore we have to minimize the damage people and government in particular do to us, and that's about ALL we can hope for, other than some basic peace and enjoyment. Now, there is a good deal of truth in this, as far as it goes. But there is a crucial difference between mere skepticism and recognition of original sin. The religious understanding that we all are flawed, ruled too often by appetites, etc. is too often reduced to mere skepticism, but is in fact something much more.
Original sin is a recognition that we are fallen, that we always must struggle with a dark side in us. But it also is a recognition that this dark side is only part of us, and the part we can and should keep under control as we seek to live up to our higher nature, the good placed in each and every one of us on account of our being created in the image of God.

Human dignity is at the root of conservatism, I would insist, because it is a recognition that we are made to live with one another in a decent, worthwhile community and life. Conservatives know that the government can't arrange our lives for us in any decent way--sin and the limits of reason see to that. But each of us has a stock of virtue that we can and should develop in ourselves and share with others to build decent relations.

I know this sounds very pie in the sky, whereas "we're all part beast" sounds wonderfully "realistic." But people do, in fact, sacrifice for others, and especially for those with whom they share important connections.

And if we really want to see to it that the bureaucrats don't end up running our lives any more than they already do, it would seem wise to build on that capacity for virtue and for building intermediate associations in which we can live free lives, and which can protect us from the encroachments of the state.

Schools can help play this role, when they are rooted in our local lives.
So can home schooling when, as with just about every home schooler I know, it is part of a community. Mass public schools guided by public ideologies undermine all this, and so does too much emphasis on the dark side.

Rod’s point that “fundamental cultural, moral and metaphysical concerns” are what’s most important about CC can’t be stressed enough. In that spirit, we should take to heart what this reader requested earlier:

…perhaps people would mis-understand the crunchy cause less if there was actually a little more focus on transcendentals … Those who are 'social conservatives' actually care a great deal about transcendentals, and would be willing to hear a calm explanation of how certain ways of life they haven't considered (such as moving into an older neighborhood or buying free range food) would tie in to those transcentendals.

I also think an analogy is appropriate here, to different ways of presenting the Gospel: The Good News vs. the Bad News.

The Bad News version says: You who struggle to do good and be happy--guess what? You’re actually more screwed than you ever imagined because there is an angry God who will judge your sins mercilessly when you die--sins you aren’t even aware you committed. Unless, of course, you accept Jesus and… “ Well, you know the rest.

The Good News is different. It says: Don’t put your hope in money, success, sex, and power--all to obtain self-acceptance and love. It won’t work. There is a God who offers His unconditional, fatherly love, and by living in communion with His family, you’ll be freed from useless striving, to live for “more than bread alone,” which is the key to happiness and peace in this life and in eternity.

Too often the Christian message is twisted into the Bad News, and it’s easy to do the same with CC.

What Rod proposes in Crunchy Cons is a way for Christians and all people of good will to more authentically live the Call to Holiness--a more genuinely human life--by integrating their faith and/or values into their lives, both personally, and as citizens. I think this is what everyone on this blog believes, whether it’s been communicated properly or not.

The implicit criticism, which can’t be avoided, is that moral conservatives have been focusing on just a few issues, while neglecting the many other ways that life in our liberal, capitalist society denies our transcendent values, and this will ultimately undermine our good intentions and goals.

But as Frederica said, what we need to focus on is a dialogue about the WHY behind the CC approach, rather than assigning blame. For those us who are Christians, we can’t take any credit for stumbling into any of this. All is grace, and charity must be our watchword. It’s just one beggar showing another beggar where they found the food.

So, Rod, would you say that you were trying to start a conversation, rather than hand down prescriptions?

I wonder if that's where the disconnect happened. You wanted to actively think through how conservative/conserving principles would affect how we arrange our personal lives, and that included reclaiming some elements that seem to have been claimed by liberals. You wanted to present how this pondering-and-reclaiming is going in your own life and those of others following a similar project. It was intended to be exploratory rather than prescriptive. Would that be accurate?

But it seems what was most memorable was the concrete illustrations. What some people heard was "You must wear Birks or you're a bad person." I remember learning in seminary: Be very careful in choosing your sermon illustrations, because that's all people will remember.

It seems to me that the most consistent and fundamental criticism has been:
"You're just baptizing your own taste."

The followup critique takes several different forms:

(a) "...and this is no time to bust up the conservative coalition."

(b) "...and when you stress that what undergirds these aesthetic choices are conservative principles, you imply that my different choices are unprincipled or thoughtless."

(c) "...and besides, it's nothing special; it's just ordinary, unhyphenated conservatism."

(d) "...and the whole thing is too vague; there is no there there."

(e) "...and Crunchy Cons are just as captive to the culture as anyone else; your assumption that you are living uniquely committed lives is delusional and smug."

does that cover the waterfront? have I missed or misunderstood anything?

(I'm also getting on a plane today -- will check in when I can.)

I’m traveling again today, and won’t get to check back in on the blog till late afternoon, so, this might be it for me on Education. Good luck today.

Frederica asked me to say what I’ve learned from the CC critics. I think the main thing is that I should have made it more clear in the book that what I’m really getting at with this project is not vegetables, or housing styles, but fundamental cultural, moral and metaphysical concerns about the way we live today. Pope Benedict has a new book out, “Without Roots”, which you can bet that I’ll be quoting from next week when we discuss religion. In the introduction, George Weigel writes:

What drives history? Politics? Economics? Some combination of politics and economics? Or should we look elsewhere to find the engine of history – to the realm of the human spirit, perhaps? Might it be that culture – what men and women honor, cherish, and worship – is the most dynamic element in human affairs, at least over the long haul?

Funny, but the other night in North Carolina, I told a friend that I see the book as one big opportunity for people who don’t know me to find me out as a fraud. “Ah-ha! You have Chee-to residue on your fingers! Junk food junkie! Hypocrite! I bet you shop at big-box stores!” Guilty as charged. Every day, I struggle to live up to my ideals, and often fail. But that doesn’t mean the ideals are invalid, nor does it mean the struggle is in vain.

In the book, Julie talks about the stay-at-home moms who were part of her circle of friends in our old Brooklyn neighborhood. All of them were liberals, politically and culturally, but the thing that bound these women together was a shared conviction that nothing--not their careers, and not the material gains that would come from having an extra income--was more important than staying at home to raise their children.

"All of us wanted more than anything to be a real part of our baby’s life. A baby, that’s a human being. That’s a soul. That’s life. The baby is not an accessory. He’s not part of life. He’s everything,” Julie said. “The kind of women I look up to and think are real heroes tend to have a gravity, a real earthiness about them. They tend to have a sense of mission and calling without taking themselves too seriously, but they also tend not to rule things out because they’re outside of the norm that you see on TV.”

…"These are women who are willing to sacrifice themselves for something else,” Julie said. “A lot of times that comes with faith, but plenty of times it just comes out of motherly love. You meet women in La Leche League who aren’t necessarily religious, but they want to do what they believe is best for their children, no matter what it costs them, and no matter if it seems odd to someone else.”

"Homeschooling forces you to see your home as a place where more than just consumption takes place. It leads you back to the traditional view of the home as a place where something was produced. It keeps you from seeing home as just a place where you sleep and eat before you go out into the rest of the world to do the really important things. It keeps you from feeling dependent on experts to do the serious teaching of your children.

“There’s nothing more important we can do than raising our children,” Julie said, growing more emphatic. “Teaching them, shaping their intellects and their character. Of course it’s hard, but ‘easy’ is not the point. Doing the right thing is the point. Homeschooling is not right for every family, but I believe that for ours, it’s worth the sacrifice.”

Today’s the last day we’re going to talk about education, but we really can’t discuss homeschooling without discussing the one thing that makes it possible: stay at home moms. In “Crunchy Cons,” I reprint an extended conversation I had with my wife Julie about her decision to leave the working world and commit herself to being a housewife and mother. We got to talking about this one night when I was writing the book, and I finally asked her if I could record it, because it was key to the book. Anyway, Julie talks about the bond of trust that has to exist between husband and wife for the wife to leave the workforce to devote herself to family and homeschooling:

"Look,” she said, “on paper, I did something really, really stupid, dropping out of the workforce at a young age to be a full-time mom. On paper, I am not qualified for a whole hell of a lot. If you left me, things would be very, very bad. And that affects a woman’s decision making. If you’re a woman who really wants to stay at home and take care of your kids, there is this voice saying, ‘What are you going to do if something bad happens, and your husband leaves you? What are you going to fall back on? If you’re in a shaky marriage, it’s going to be hard for you.”

This is where our religious faith comes in. Father Paul Williams, the priest who married Julie and me, introduced into the wedding ritual a Bosnian Catholic custom. He asked us to both hold on to a crucifix at one point in the ceremony, and he told us that as long as we held on to Christ, we could hold on to each other no matter what. But if we let go of Christ, everything was in danger. What he meant was that if you consecrate your marriage to God, and both believe that our “till death do us part” promise to each other is binding in the most solemn way imaginable, and we both humble ourselves before the reality of God and that promise--then we will find the strength and the humility to hold on to each other, come what may. Any stay-at-home mom is making a tremendous act of faith in her husband and his constancy. If my wife didn’t know how seriously I take our religion, and the obligations it imposes on me as a husband and father, I imagine it would be very hard for her to do what she does.

And yet, think of the freedom that trust gives her to devote herself to our boys! Choosing to start a family at a relatively young age (24) and to devote herself fulltime to the kids and their education taught her an important life lesson:

"Well, we knew that this idea that you should have everything, and that life should be easy, was bogus,” Julie mused. “I will say, though, that knowing someone like Frederica [Mathewes-Green], which is not something most young women have the chance to do, was very helpful to me. When I look at her, I see someone who married young, had children young, and who has had a fruitful career after that. There was a sequencing there. I think a lot of people my age don’t, quite frankly, hae the attention span to stop and realize that you don’t have to do everything at once, and that you simply can’t do it all. You have to choose.”

That’s the thing nobody wants to hear, I suggested.

“Well, the problem with a lot of women my age is that we were raised in a total self-esteem culture,” Julie said. “We were brought up to think it was all about us, and that we should be happy and content, and that we should do whatever we need to do to be happy and content. For some women, having children is something they do thinking it’s going to fulfill them, and when raising kids turns out to be difficult, it’s a terrible disappointment. If you stay home with your kids because it’s the right thing to do, you’d be surprised by how much strength you find to get through the hard parts, and to find real satisfaction, even joy, in them. It’s all about your attitude.”

A cautionary tale:

A GERMAN organic farmer has admitted to feeding a elderly friend who died while visiting him to his pigs in order to claim his pension.

The pigs were then later eaten by people who bought the meat at local butchers' shops.

Christian Roeben, 28, from Fritzlar, near Frankfurt, told locals who questioned him about his friend, Friedhelm Bogner, that he had left his sheltered housing unit and gone into a nursing home.

In Crunchy Cons, I quote E.F. Schumacher as saying that if we are going to reform our education system meaningfully, we have to once again educate with metaphysics in mind. I think what he means, in layman’s terms, is we have to have a certain idea of transcendent reality, and transcendent truth, undergirding the entire educational process. John Taylor Gatto identifies himself as a “lapsed Roman Catholic” who identifies strongly with the Western, Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition. He says the spiritually contented man is the greatest enemy of the mass society, and argues that there is no greater way for big government and big business to impose their will on the American people than by pushing religion to the sidelines of American education:

Spiritually contented people are dangerous for a variety of reasons. They don’t make reliable servants because they won’t jump at every command. They test what is requested against a code of moral principle. Those who are spiritually secure can’t easily be driven to sacrifice family relations.

For it takes a good deal of courage to say no to the fashons and fascinations of the age and to question the presupposition of a civilization which appears to be destined to conquer the whole world the requisite strength can be derived only from deep convictions.

Jason has a point. The retired NYC schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto has detailed in his “Underground History of American Education” how the men who set up the US system of public education and funded the education colleges had Progressive theories of human behavior--including flat-out eugenicist ideas for remaking the masses according to a scientifically efficient model--in mind. They set out to produce mass men (and women) who would be conformist, unattached to tradition and family, and consumerist--because that was what industrial society needed, or so they believed. (You can see an outline of Gatto’s ideas here, and read the entire book, chapter by chapter, here--it’s amazing stuff). Allan Carlson explores the anti-family, statist, utopian roots of American education in this lecture, to wit:

Horace Mann of Massachusetts, the acknowledged "father" of the Common Schools in the mid-19th Century, held a similar attitude. Citing the "neglect," ignorance, and inefficiencies of families in his state, he underscored the special brutality of what he labeled "monster families," deemed totally unworthy of their children. Indeed, Mann linked the "common school" system to a vision of the later welfare state, where government simply assumed the role of parent. As he wrote in his school report for 1846: "Massachusetts is parental in her government. More and more, as year after year rolls by, she seeks to substitute prevention for remedy, and rewards for penalties."

The Common School Journal, founded by Mann and colleagues in 1838, featured the deconstruction of family life as one of its regular themes. Passages included:

· the public schools succeed because "parents, although the most sunken in depravity themselves, welcome the proposals and receive with gratitude the services of moral philanthropy in behalf of their families";

· "[T]hese are ...illustrations of the folly of a parent, who interferes with and perplexes a teacher while instructing or training his child";

· "the little interests or conveniences of the family" must be subordinate to "the paramount subject" of the school; and

· "there are many worthless parents."

Such sentiments spread with public education across the country over the middle decades of the 19th Century. John Swett, an early superintendent of the California state schools, was blunt in his opinion that the state must supplant the family. In his 1864 report to the state legislature, Swett explained that "the child should be taught to consider his instructor superior to the parent in point of authority. ... The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous. ... Parents have no remedy as against the teacher."

F.W. Parker, the so-called "father of progressive education" and inspiration for John Dewey, told the 1895 convention of the National Education Association (NEA) that "the child is not in school for knowledge. He is there to live, and to put his life, nurtured in the school, into the community." The family home and religious faith simply must give way to a grander vision. As Parker concluded: "Every school in the land should be a home and heaven for children."

Jason from Florida writes:

I'm a little disappointed with how the Education discussion is shaping up on the Crunchy Con blog.

I think education is at the heart of the maladies described in Crunchy Cons. Hyper-consumerism, libertinism, environmental degradation, poor stewardship of the animal world, urban sprawl, aesthetically unpleasant architecture: all these problem can be blamed in part on (A) there being simply too many people in the world and (B) that so many people are ignorant and not virtuous.

Public schools don't teach sudents to think critically and they certainly don't teach wisdom. They're not even good for teaching basic algebra (http://www.nationalreview.com/seipp/seipp200602130809.asp). They are pretty good, however, at turning youth into obedient conformists and teaching them to reject the values of their parents at the same time. As H.L. Mencken said, "The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States and that is its aim everywhere else." I don't want to go into the specific problems of public education, but I think it's easy to see why our society is plagued with crises when public schools churn out young adults who lack moral character, common knowledge, and the ability to think critically. Should the architecture of urban sprawl surprise us when we send kids to school for 12 years in buildings that look and function like prisons? Is it shocking that kids are easy prey for marketers when the real public school curriculum is about teaching students to be good little worker-bees and good consumers?

On the Crunchy Con blog, however, there seems to be an underlying sentiment that public schools aren?t bad per se; it?s just that the culture is so immoral today that many don?t want their kids exposed to it. Your reader from Utah speaks up for public schools saying, "In small towns across America, the local high school is the community. It's the glue that holds the town together."

There's some truth to that, but it hasn't always been the case.

Public education in America didn't become universal until the first decade of the twentieth century. I would argue instead that the advent of mandatory public schooling has been destructive to family and community life in America. Besides that, America was somehow able to produce men of formidable intellect and character without the benefit of public schools. Franklin, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, etc. Furthermore, does anyone honestly think the average 18 year-old in 1830s America was not better prepared for citizenship and to meet the challenges of life than the average 18 year-old today or even of the 1950s?

Dave from Georgia wrote, "School is a community thing ? it makes us. My Dad had as much fun going to my Mom's high school reunions in Michigan as he did going to his own in Pennsylvania. I share a common ground with everyone who graduated from high school in 1973." Umm, so what? Everyone looks back on his youth with nostalgia. But, excepting elementary school students, almost no one stuck in the cycle of 4-6 classes a day, 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year for 12 years actually speaks positively of the experience...not at least until he/she looks back on it with 10 years or more distance.

I would say for anyone who cares about his children and his community, the best thing to do for both is to pursue home schooling.

Lots of email in response to my comments regarding the military. Some favorable, but much of it could be summarized as saying “How dare you be so anti-American!” Well, I’m not being anti-American. To demonstrate, once again I’ll let NR’s military historian in residence VDH make my point.

First, VDH on why there was little to no anti-war movement after Pearl Harbor as compared to the anti-war movement following 9/11:

Then a much poorer, much more endangered populace was still in large part rural or lived in small communities, felt shame, and knew that America was good or at least better than the alternatives. The rise of big government, big corporations, and anonymous suburbs have created a sort of transience and unaccountability, enhanced by enormous wealth and materialism. The Clintons on the Left and the Enron people on the Right are good examples--the lifestyles of each, the similar improper financial deals, the abuse of language, the sense of entitlement, all that is the same. Bill Clinton is the Ken Lay of politics--pampered, insincere, duplicitious, felonious, smug, and star-struck. Both are reflections of the corruptions of the time; the one mouths concern for the poor, the other for free markets, but they both like Aspen, peddle influence, and share the same values.

Because we are products of an affluent and leisured West, we have a special burden to remember how tenuous and fragile civilization remains outside our suburbs…. [W]e have the leisure to engage in utopian musing, assured that our economy, or our unseen soldiers, or our system working on autopilot, will always ensure us such prerogatives. And in the La-La Land of Washington and New York, it is especially easy to forget that we are not even like our own soldiers in Iraq, now sleeping outside without toilets and air conditioners, eating dehydrated food, and trying to distinguish killers from innocents. What does all this mean? Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in arms — even when those enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate byproduct of an enlightened society. I think we are indulging in this unreal hypercriticism [of the war] — even apart from the election-season antics of our politicians — because we are not being gassed, or shot, or even left hot or hungry.

[T]he danger to a civilisation that is sophisticated and that has conquered the age-old challenges of feeding people, and of keeping them sheltered and protected, has always been over-abundance of wealth, and how you inculcate to an affluent suburban youth principles of an agrarian virtue, muscularism, patriotism, family values [and] civic duty. We have a large group of several million people in our media, government, and universities who have the privilege and the luxury to almost make fun of, indeed, trash or criticise, the very culture that gave them so much abundance.

The attitude reflected in many of the responses to Rod’s book—the attitude of don’t criticize; knee-jerk defense of suburbia and transience and rootlessness and materialism and sacrifice-free comfort from sea to shining sea; false accusations of anti-Americanism; etc.,—is not harmless. Reality (that infamous mugger) is lurking ‘round the next corner, or perhaps the one after that. It can be avoided for a while, but it always makes itself known in the end. And as C.S. Lewis remarked, nature is a far harsher taskmaster than reason.

Gina from Roanoke:

I've been keeping up with the CC blog. There are many reasons parents choose to homeschool their children. Some of mine are religious. I take Deuteronomy 6:4-9 to heart. Do I think that means everyone should homeschool? No, but I do think that if public school is working against what you are teaching your children at home, it is time to take them out.

I always chuckled when people raised the socialization question with me. I don't know why anyone thought their child being "socialized" by children their own age from families one doesn't know was a good idea. Though, it's been a few years since that question has been brought up to me.

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Father Joseph Fessio in January. The interview had largely to do with Islam and it's inability to coexist with the West. His comment on homeschooling I found intriguing and the more I see what is going on in the world and in our culture, the more I think he may be right.

JF: Well, Hugh, I've got one of the very few things that I've said, which I'm proud of, because it's become kind of almost a slogan to some, is that home schools are the monasteries of the new dark ages. That is...and you non-Catholic Christians have a lot more of them than we Catholics do, but we've got a lot. And I think that is where families are having children. They're passing on the faith to their children. They're giving them wisdom and the knowledge of our culture. And we have an advantage here, because the homosexuals, and the pro-abortionists, and the pro-contraception people, are not having children by definition.

HH: That's in the Steyn article as well.

There is so much more that I could say about homeschooling. I love it. I love being with my children and getting to know them so well. I love teaching them and passing on the values of our faith. I love watching them learn - about themselves, the world, those who inhabit it and the God who made it.

March 16, 2006

At this half-way point through the chapter promenade maybe we should take a short breather; the conversation might benefit from some cooling off. Rod, to that end, would you answer a question? Earlier today you said:

I’ve learned a lot from critics of the book.

Rod's emailers brought up a number of good points about public schools. I wish I could believe it would be a good idea to send my kids to the local public school--but guess what? There IS no local public school near where I live, just a warehouse to which hundreds of kids are shipped via bus every day. When we "consolidated" our school districts, we made humane education all but impossible in most of them. Some good public schools remain, generally ones where the local parents have managed to keep their local school open, against the wishes of the people who "know better" and want to get better sports teams, better physical plant, and greater efficiency in terms of costs. The ideological battle also is a real and important one, but one that could be won if teachers and parents actually lived in close proximity and communicated on a one-on-one basis. Once again, a basic, conservative principle (localism) has been lost in our public institutions, making it harder to lead good lives.

In Ann Arbor there is a flourishing homeschool community, with much sharing of duties and socialization. We don't participate because it isn't right for us, for a number of reasons, none of which make us respect homeschoolers any less. Neither do we send our kids to the local parish-schools, which have substantial problems with standards, ideology (!) and some rather nasty clique-ishness. Nor do we send our kids to the rather punitive and primitive independent Catholic schools we've been encouraged to send them to. We are lucky enough to have a local independent Catholic school in which teachers, parents, and students live their faith in kindness and warmth. My kids, with the help of parents and teachers, are learning to be good people, as well as getting a terrific education. But we had to look long and hard for the school, and many people dismiss it as "not Catholic enough" (mass only once per week, from the most holy man I've ever met) or too "undisciplined." Yet kids from this school do wonderfully in their later education, and in life (judging from the scores, which always are suspect, better than anyone else).

I think there is a moral, here: there is in fact a permanent, universal good of educating your kids to be good, learned people with the skills and habits necessary to lead good, decent lives. But there is no one, single way to achieve that, especially in a society that is as fragmented as ours. One of the central lessons of a traditional reading of natural law is that the universal is made real in the particular. The good isn't attainable as an abstraction, unconnected to circumstances. Whatever the activity--education, economics, politics, architecture--there is no one, abstract, best approach to doing it well under all circumstances, which means making it part of a good life. You have to do the best you can to construct a good life, and anyone who simply says "if you don't do it this way, you are lazy and immoral" is being silly as well as uncharitable. But if you are not willing to think of education, economics, politics, architecture, and indeed most parts of your life, as part of leading a good life, you are most certainly going to make it harder to raise your children to be good people, and to be a good person yourself, regardless of what you happen to read, where you happen to kneel, or how you happen to vote.

That's right, I'm known the world over for not being able to take a joke. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm about 99.9% sure you liked that post because you think it's "funny because it's true," as Homer Simpson might say.

Wow, looks like Larison pushed your button, Jonah. Hey, if I can laugh at this, surely it wouldn’t hurt you to recognize yourself in some of the comments of other bloggers.

From Crunchy Cons:

The biggest question – and it’s usually in the form of a complaint – homeschooling parents are most frequently hit with is “How will your kids be socialized?” What the person asking that usually means is “Aren’t you going to turn them into anti-social nerds?”

To which the screamingly obvious response is, look at the values predominating in youth culture today; is that really working for us?

Julie and I don’t have much use for many of the moral values of the mainstream, and don’t want our boys to be socialized by them. It’s not just about sex. We recoil from the moneyed, media-savvy, techno-driven, status-mad cult of cool that reigns today. We don’t want our kids to be in a school where they’ll pay a price for being a nonconformist. We want them to learn in an atmosphere informed by our religious, mroal, and philosophical values.

Research has shown that by the time a kid hits his early teen years, his peers exert far more influence on his choices than do his parents. What does that mean? For one, it means that kids in today’s schools are surrounded by a materialistic and hypercompetitive value system that exalts money, looks, and athletic achievement above all. School has no doubt always been that way, but as our society has become more affluent and increasingly unmoored from traditional values, the stakes for kids have grown higher.

"In homeschooling our kids, we’re not looking to create an artificial environment, but a natural one, where our kids can be kids for as long as they need to be. It’s hard enough for an adult, mature in faith and with a coherent moral and political philosophy, to withstand the barrage of sexuality and materials she encounters every day. How can we begin to hope that our children can sift through that on their own and come out unscathed?”

"Real socialization – that is, learning to get along with other people – doesn’t have to happen in a herd of peers. Parents are other people, too, and so are brothers and sisters, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, the mailman, the doctor, the dentist, the librarian, and all the many others a child meets in the normal course of life. Learning to get along with them, peacefully and courteously, is the best kind of socialization, the kind kids will need for the rest of their lives.”

Yup, Rod. It's a laugh riot. That Larison guy really has us pegged! All of us rubes just don't get it. We lack enlightenment and are just too small and 2-dimensional to benefit from the hard thinking and important insights you're offering. Good for you, taking the high road and just laughing off any criticism of crunchy conservatism from those suffering from false consciousness.

Please, please don't tell me crunchy conservatism doesn't suffer from smugness anymore, ok?

This is really, really funny. Dan Larison is obviously a close reader, and savorer, of this blog.

This time, Dave from Georgia:

Hating to quote liberals, but A. Stevenson, "The best thing about America is our system of free public education," and K. Vonnegut, "The most American thing about America is high school."

You old enough and Southern enough to know the racial baggage that private and home schooling carries with it. It's the strategy of defeat and retreat. It's not standing athwart history, it's sitting on the sidelines.

Most people simply aren't competent to teach their own children at home much beyond spelling and the multiplication tables, and even then that can be a struggle, depending on parent-child relationships (I can teach my 9-year-old grandson anything; he and his mother end up snarling after ten minutes of homework). See how much sense home-schooling makes when your kids reach those awkward, teenaged years. You start looking at a breeding-ground for adolescent rebellion (which is not a modern phenomena, but ages old -- a century ago we sent 14-year-olds to "help out" for a year on their uncle's farm, to avoid strangling them).

School is a community thing -- it makes us. My Dad had as much fun going to my Mom's high school reunions in Michigan as he did going to his own in Pennsylvania. I share a common ground with everyone who graduated from high school in 1973.

My e-mail gives me away as a teacher (one of "them"), but my conservative creds (Retired US Army, never voted for a Democrat, grandparents who cast 16 votes against FDR, great-great-great-grandpa who voted for Fremont in 1856) probably cast me as an "Ur-Con".

Wonderful insights from Rob, who teaches in a Utah public school:

As a public school teacher, you have given me lots to ponder. I appreciated the fact that the chapter deals much more with the benefits of home-schooling than with the ills of the public school system. We teachers can be a sensitive bunch - not because we don't see the problems, but maybe because we get so much criticism from outside of education that we see no sense in "piling on".

My wife and I have a five-year-old daughter who will start school next year, and a baby boy whose adoption will become final in four weeks. I taught school for quite a while before having kids, and I will confess that I think about some things differently now. Kids definitely get exposed to things in school that you want to protect them from if you can.

I take your point about protecting your kids from the worst elements of the culture and agree with you completely about the "hypersexualization" of American culture. As a teacher though, what has me walking around in a funk all the time is the fundamental dishonesty and pervasive cheating that takes place. I want to raise honest children and it is so frustrating to see so many kids from good, conservative, church-going families who see no problem with regular, systematic cheating. What is most upsetting is the attitude towards it - they don't see it as wrong. Many parents seem willing to defend or at least try to rationalize the cheating when their children are caught.

Every now and then students will try to pin me down on whether or not I ever cheated in high school. I tell them that I did on occasion, but that I had the decency to be ashamed if caught, and never told myself that what I was doing was right. So, if I was going to homeschool my children, I think that would be as big a factor as any.

I'm thinking now about your liberal friend who worried about what would happen to the public schools if good people give up on them. Definitely a valid concern in my mind. It's also hard to refute your response - our children are our first responsibility over and above any, admittedly more vague, societal responsibilities. Still, I don't think you can ignore the larger issues. As a rule, most of the kids being homeschooled are kids that I would love to have in class. Give me a class full of kids from two parent homes who are eager to learn, with strong moral values, whose parents are active and engaged in their education, and watch many of the problems associated with public education disappear.

We are concerned about the lack of community and rightly so. You point out in your book how homeschooling families form their own tight-knit bonds.

That is fine, but I really question whether it serves the community as a whole. In small towns across America, the local high school is the community. It's the glue that holds the town together. I'm thinking about movies like "Hoosiers". In Wendell Berry's recent novel, "Jayber Crow", he writes eloquently about what the local school meant to the "members" of the Port William community and about how its eventual closing to consolidate with another school in Hargrave was so devastating. I'm sitting in my classroom right now thinking about the problems with my school, but also about how last week when we had parent-teacher conferences and were here late in the evening how our PTA group came around to each classroom with a hot home-cooked meal for all 97 teachers. I'm also thinking about all the things that make this job so rewarding despite the fact that I make 38K with a Masters degree and ten years in the classroom. No matter how close and loving a family is, kids (especially teenagers) greatly benefit from having more adults in their lives that care about them. Teenagers actively search for role models outside of their families. If you are sensitive to that as a teacher, you can do much good and it more than makes up for the headaches and frustration that comes with this job. If you all homeschool, you deprive me of that!

Well, I must now go deliver my lecture on the New Deal to 44 eager AP U.S. History students (large classes, big families here in Utah ) who I thank God their parents don't choose to homeschool. I'll try and go easy on FDR.

Here’s a great letter from Krista in Ohio, a semi-crunchy traditionalist:

You are talking about a sensibility, which is another way of saying you should live your life deliberately, in full knowledge of the consequences for everyone, not just your own personal consequences. Does that mean you discount your own consequences? Do you beggar or endanger your children? Of course not, but you had better make sure you are doing as little damage as possible to others as well, AND DO THE BEST YOU CAN.

That is the message I take away. I consider my family to have extremely traditional ideas, even a few very crunchy ones, but our experience is very different from yours. You are merely using your life and experiences to show one path that leads to "the way".

Our family lives in a suburb of Cleveland, shops at Wal-mart, and uses public schools. On the surface we look terrible! But we have our reasons: The "suburb" we live in is full of McMansions, but we chose to live in a quirky old house on the edge of town with fixer upper problems because it has acreage. The reason we picked our particular part of town is because the nastiest/ seediest /most pornified places around here are the rural areas, so we chose to live in between rural and suburbia, and it works out nicely for us. My children have devastating illnesses which are in part caused by environmental issues and "modern" foods. So we shop at Wal-mart for their clothes and things so we can afford their medical care and to obtain the best, cleanest organic food for them. Would I shop at Wal-mart if I didn't have to? Of course not. It is a necessary evil.

Our children attend public school, but it is not a problem for us because the schools are the best in the state, my husband works there, and so we avoid most of the lefty teachers for our kids because he can request the good ones, and it is a small town, everyone knows everyone, and the social influence is not too bad. I feel we have had some good conversations with our children about learning to live in the world and not be of the world. When we are at a school function and all the other kids are running around like maniacs, we say, our family doesn't do that, and it is good for them to learn to be a good example to others and to learn to stand up for their beliefs. If the influence started to go the other way, and the culture was damaging them, would we pull them out? You bet, but I feel it is good for the community we live in for them to see us, and the way we live. I am always amazed when we have another little one start school, how shocked they are that my children never went to preschool- (I stay at home with them.) because they are sure that my kids will need lots of catching up, but then they are even more amazed that they can already read and are well on their way. I can see how others think we are only agreeing with each other and congratulating our selves, but we are really trying to show them that there is another way, a higher road.

You don't have to choose the mainstream if you are brave enough to take some criticism. Invariably, people ask me how did you teach them to read at such a young age? When I tell them my children never watch TV, only an occasional movie of our choosing, and they listen to me read aloud every day, they are dismayed. They want to hear about the particular brand of phonics flash cards we purchased, not the sacrifice, time and attention method. There is a right way to do things and an easy way. The crunchy way is choosing the higher road for your family and community whenever you can.

An e-mail:

"Isn't there something good and 'crunchy' about Catholic schools, which often
require parental involvement as part of the tuition deal?"

No! There is *nothing* "crunchy" about Catholic schools as such.

That's part of the problem with what has been written on the blog (I haven't
read the book). Whatever is good, true, and noble is, by their definition,
"crunchy." By that token, whoever recognizes the importance of transcendence
is dragooned as a "crunchy"; if they resist, they are mourned as a hapless
victim of consumerism or denounced as a hypocrite.

That's a great way to generate reaction, but it's a backward way to
understand the world, and a hopeless way to develop a philosophy of life.

An e-mail:

We keep hearing that CCism is not just a fetishization of certain 'crunchy' lifestyle choices, but rather an effort to focus on the transcendentals.

However, perhaps people would mis-understand the crunchy cause less if there was actually a little more focus on transcendentals on the blog itself. Instead, we seem to get a lot of pronouncements (admitedly most of them from Caleb) about how moving away from your ancestral home is almost always selfish, parents who put their kids in daycare are nearly always negligent, and those who live in suburbs (perhaps in search of larger houses and larger yards) are a bunch of consumerists who don't care about community.

Now, I have the feeling that the vast majority of 'mainstream conservatives' at least those who are 'social conservatives' actually care a great deal about transcendentals, and would be willing to hear a calm explanation of how certain ways of life they haven't considered (such as moving into an older neighborhood or buying free range food) would tie in to those transcentendals.

But if all the blog is interested in doing is huffily demanding whether those who disagree with it on architecture or home size are sufficiently against abortion and gay marriage (an odd accusation, considering that from at least one comment on the blog it is apparently 'crunchy' to vote for pro-choice liberals if they're sufficiently 'pro-environment') then all it will achieve is to convince mainstream conservatives (and many 'crunchy' ones) that the writers are hot heads.

Let me make a point that is in even more sympathy with Jonah’s Houston correspondent. I think it is a basic conservative principle that people should stick it out within the little platoons they belong to. On the most basic level, this is why, for example, no-fault divorce is not something a conservative should value (though he may be willing to tolerate it as a political necessity). However, there are times when one’s little platoon is so overburdened with centralized control and meddling from without that leaving really is the only option for almost everyone. So rereading the Houston emailer I will say that my first judgment may have been too harsh. The destruction of her neighborhood by ill-conceived government programs really isn’t her fault. Leaving is sometimes necessary. There is no silver bullet to our problems, and “crunchiness” certainly isn’t one. There is only the struggle to live in fidelity to what we know and have been taught are the deepest truths about God, our fellows, and reality. To the extent the struggle continues even as we may be in strategic retreat--yes, even retreat to the suburbs!--I say “Huzzah!” To the extent we throw up our hands and stop struggling in order to get what we can while everything else goes to hell, I say that’s a big problem.

Rod asks some good questions about the tough education choices facing conservative parents:

But what does it say about their intention to build community when they remove their kids from the public schools? What will it do to the public schools if they take their kids out? And won’t it hurt those homeschooled kids not to get to know kids like them?

I know full well they ain't all perfect, but what about private schools? What about Catholic schools (sometimes invisible miracles)? And what about charter schools? Isn't there something good and "crunchy" about Catholic schools, which often require parental involvement as part of the tuition deal? That gathers around First Communions and Confirmations...?

And for that matter on public schools (and, to some extent private/religious ones too), can't the threat of the great mix provide opportunities for kids that homeschooling just never can? Especially combined with parental loving (and guiding) care?

It is pretty safe to say that Maggie has an appreciation for the necessity of the transcendent to the values she dedicates so much of her work to.

I wonder if it’s occurred to Maggie that the gay marriage movement she so ably and tirelessly fights is premised on the idea that transcendentals don’t exist, and that marriage is merely a social institution that can be tweaked and re-engineered to fit the demands of the marketplace. Which is the kind of consumerist/individualist sensibility that crunchy cons are trying to fight…

To be clear, I don’t fault your Houston correspondent, Jonah, for making the choice she and her husband did. Again and again, let me say that CC is not an ideology, it’s a sensibility, and sometimes the ideals we hold will conflict. I’ve made clear that if Julie and I didn’t believe our neighborhood was safe--at least as safe, and perhaps more safe, than the Capitol Hill neighborhood I lived on for years--we wouldn’t be here. And if we didn’t have a good school arrangement, and had to use the public schools, we’d be in the suburbs too. Most people can’t have everything. From my perspective, your correspondent is doing the most conservative and countercultural thing she can do nowadays, which is to stay home with the kids and make material sacrifices to make that possible. (Second most conservative thing she can do: turn off the TV, if she has one). Caleb’s “Urban Settler” might disagree with this. I suspect that what U.S. might be responding to is a sense among some white conservatives that they have to run as far and as fast as they can from anything that says “urban decay”--this for reasons that are understandable in some cases, and ugly in others. I’d lived in Dallas for a year before we started looking in earnest for a house, and if you had asked me during most of that time if I would have chosen to live in the neighborhood I live in now, I would have thought you were nuts. Junius Heights is too close to the ‘hood, I thought. But later, when I actually started to look closely at this neighborhood and the actual crime stats, the picture changed, and I realized that I was acting out of an unreasonable fear and probably even prejudice. And it’s this kind of prejudice--not a conclusion based on a reasonable considerations, but on irrational fear--that leads to middle-class people abandoning urban neighborhoods that ought to be fought for.

On the other hand, as I write in the book, a guy I know who lives out not too far from Mitch left his dream house in an old neighborhood because he got tired of the cops having to come down his street all the time to deal with Mexican laborers living 20 or more to a rent house, drinking, fighting and partying--and the city would do nothing to stop it. He worried about raising a family in that neighborhood with all the police trouble, and the unwillingness or inability of the authorities to do something about it. From what I know, he made the right choice there, even though it broke his heart to do so. This too is one of the prices we pay for not guarding our borders, and wanting to have cheap illegal immigrant labor here to keep prices for goods and services down.

Anyway, all I ask is that people examine their motives for their choices, and realize that where we choose to live matters to our families and our communities in ways we don’t often consider.

Jonah, those are all fair points, and well taken. This discussion really requires more than the blog format allows for, but permit me just a couple of quick responses.

First, I am not interested in spitting on anyone! I am not talking about anyone specifically. I acknowledge that this discussion is using a lot of broad brushes that will not capture the truth about a whole lot of people. That doesn’t mean the broad brush strokes don’t capture something essentially true.

Second, I’m not trying to recruit people into any kind of crunchy movement. I don’t really care if there is a “crunchy” movement per se, and I doubt Rod does either. In fact, I think it would be better if there weren’t.

Third, while I sympathize with the “it’s not my fault” and “I’ll get what I can” attitude of your correspondent, I cannot think that it has much to recommend itself for the future of our great culture and country (note: this is not a prescription for bigger government!).

Finally, the only reason I’m writing these things (I don’t stand to gain a thing--except perhaps scorn and derision--from participation in this here blog) is out of a genuine love of my home and my country and concern for our mutual future. The canaries in the coal mine are dying all over the place and if conservatives who act out of a deep love for the most important things aren’t there to ask the tough questions, who will be?

Caleb - Judging from my email, your "good email" from that "urban settler" is precisely the sort of thing that gives Crunchy Conservatism a bad name. The guy more than once calls people who want to raise their families in good, safe, neighborhoods cowards. That's idiotic. If this guy wants to be an urban homesteader, good for him. But spare me the smug superiority, he isn't that special. Again Crunchy Conservatism seems to assert itself by insulting those who aren't crunchy.

Those American pioneers from yesteryear, by the way, plunged into risk and danger out of necessity not out of a love of risk and danger. They were looking for a good life for their families (which they defined in personal terms and measured in large part on material prosperity). Ninety-nine percent of families are looking for the good life, personally defined. If some choose not to find it by gentrifying a bad neighborhood, I fail to see why that makes them deficient in some way. I don't want to clutter this blog with email. But here's an excerpt from an email from a lady in Houston in response to your "good email":

So now my husband and I have to feel guilty for the plight of inner city Houston? We have to feel ashamed that we live in the suburbs of Houston instead of living in the Third Ward? We have to feel personal responsibility for the crime ridden neighborhoods full of drug addicts and gang members? It is our fault, because we are "white flight suburbanites" who only moved to the suburbs out of fear and insecurity? Give me a break! We have two young children. Rod Dreher, whom I highly respected until I started reading this blog, might think it is great to live within earshot of nightly gunfire because "small, local, old and particular are better", but we will pass. We work hard for what we have, and we don't "owe" anyone in the inner city. We aren't cowards because we don't want to live in the middle of nightly drug wars, we are good parents. We have a limited income, since I am staying home to raise our children, so there are many "crunchy" things that we just can't afford. I shop at Wal-Mart and Target because I can't afford to buy $6 cereal at Whole Foods. I sometimes buy my children's clothes at Wal-Mart, and don't buy much for myself, including Birkenstocks, so that we can spend our money in other ways, including tithing. We do many things to help others in our community. I am no less conservative than any of you, and I resent being painted as some sort of contemptible person who doesn't live a life of "true beauty". Try living in the real world, where not everyone has a six-figure or higher salary. We are scrimping to send our son to a private Christian school, and hope to send our daughter there when she is old enough. It is a huge financial issue for us right now, but we are making it work. We won't sacrifice our children to the Utopian dream of rebuilding the inner city. I taught for many years in a low-income school before staying home, and I can't tell you how many children told me that they didn't need to worry about working because they could just stay home and get a check like their mom. It is not my fault that people won't take responsibility for themselves, it is not my fault that inner city men abandon the children they father with multiple women, it is not my fault that they choose drugs over getting a real job, and it is not my job to live next door to them.

If Caleb Stegall really feels that my husband and I are part of "the suburban landscape of instant gratification, fear, and spoiled denizens of personal desire", then we will just stick to our ugly little life and tune out from the Crunchy Con movement.

What a shame that you have to paint all of us with such a broad brush. I care about "the environment", we are striving to raise our children to have strong moral character, and we are very active in our church. Yet Caleb Stegall sounds like he would spit on us if he could, because we don't live on a farm surrounded by "real beauty". You just lost us.

Here's Gallagher reacting to the Crunchy room yesterday.

Well, my atrophied butt is ready to shuffle and galumph away from this chapter (and without even discussing the philosophical principles behind the Arts & Crafts movement, alas). I know! Let’s move on to the education chapter. In it, I focus on homeschooling as a CC ideal. (Please hold your accusations that I am trying to say that people who don’t homeschool are bad parents who don’t care about their kids. I do not say that, nor do I believe that. So let’s please not go there).

We can talk about the merits of homeschooling as a conservative phenomenon for the next couple of days, but as I’ll be traveling again tomorrow, and will only be able to check in and out, I want to toss out a question to the group. Crunchy cons are supposed to be big on communitarianism, on building community. But what does it say about their intention to build community when they remove their kids from the public schools? What will it do to the public schools if they take their kids out? And won’t it hurt those homeschooled kids not to get to know kids like them?

In brief, my answer is that I would not put my child in a school where I didn’t think he would get a decent education just to make a social point. More important to me, though, is the kind of moral and cultural environment he would be in. The disorder, in all kinds of ways. I talked last night to a child psychologist who used to work in administration in a public school district in a very wealthy suburban county on the East Coast. He told me that he and his staff did a study a few years back of chronically disruptive elementary school students in their district, who had become a big problem. What they found, in the end, was that most of these kids’ parents were more or less letting them watch TV nonstop, and giving them little attention or discipline. And these kids, in turn, were bringing this antisocial behavior into the classrooms.

I mentioned to the psychologist that his former county is one of the most prosperous in the country, so he’s not talking about the children of the poor. “No,” he said. “These were children of the middle and upper middle class.”

A teacher I know, who teaches in one of her state’s top-rated public schools, told me that she feels like more of a social worker than a teacher some days. She said that so many kids come to school having had to raise themselves – middle-class kids, not poor kids – because they have no dad, or both parents work, or this or that. She said their home lives are chaotic, and it shows in their schoolwork and behavior. She too stressed that this is a cultural matter not limited to the poor and working poor. And yet, she said, parents expect the schools to raise their kids for them, to teach them “values” – basically, to socialize the kids.

Well, look, not all public schools are the same because not all places are the same. In general, though, we get back to Alasdair Macintyre’s observation again about a loss of common culture, and commitment to some pretty basic virtues. Do you really want to throw your kids into that kind of mixmaster, or do you want to form a new kind of community with other homeschoolers who share more conservative pedagogical and moral values? And if so, how do you reconcile that with a desire for stronger community in general? Discuss.

And as a follow up to my last, just to be completely clear, my remarks had nothing to do with those in the military, for whom I have nothing but the deepest respect and gratitude. They were aimed at an environment that is increasingly skeptical of or downright hostile to military service. Consider the controversy over army recruiting in high schools and colleges. It is generally true, I believe, that when the societal trend is towards cocooning oneself and one’s family in a fully controlled and “safe” environment where no one will have to experience any risk or hardship and where everyone is as fully sequestered from death as possible, military duty will begin to appear horrific. Of course there are numerous exceptions, there always are, and thank God there are. But the trend is real, and it would be putting our heads in the sand to pretend otherwise.

I wonder what Army recruiters would say about this?

The commentators over at Southern Appeal’s comboxes have knives drawn over this crunchy con business. It reads like a pithier version of this here blog.

March 15, 2006

A former military guy emails this:

Our military (and other forces for domestic order) depends on hardy urban and rural folk, or simply people who have or have had some regular, formative consciousness of a real risk to life and limb in the course of their daily pursuits. This tends to mean being in or near places where law and order are not assured by paid proxies and where what order there is is gained by the wit, strength, and virtue of private individuals.

What one learns in the more "natural" and "tribal" country and city environments is pure and direct: real limitations, real consequences, and a disinclination to see creatures and creation with a sick instrumentalism, "as flies to wanton boys." The rest of the population may be—it seems some in the NRO staff environs are—a bunch of helpless, atrophied, decadent free-riders. Get too many of these, and a society falls apart.

Good email from a self-described “urban settler”:

The difference between modern American mobility and the old frontier is that the modern version is about running away from perceived risks and threats. Barring the semi-mythical sociopaths who were always looking for "more elbow room" or to escape the sound of axes and the presence of neighbors (Daniel Boone, "Pa" Ingalls, and Cooper's Leatherstocking), frontiersmen and settlers in the old west went toward threats and took risks, generally with the goal of settling a place so they could cease moving. Contemporary suburban man tends to have this desire to escape others (as well as taxes but not expensive services and infrastructure) but with little tolerance for risk, danger, and delayed gratification.

As someone who lives on a crimeless block in a still seedy but slowly gentrifying neighborhood, and as someone who makes it his business as a free citizen to deter and fight crime, I personally have a very hard time not expressing utter contempt for the weakness of white flight suburbanites who compensate for their reactive life of fear and insecurity with SUVs and the idea they are being responsible, mature adults with their obsessions about property values and school district SAT scores. Bad neighborhoods don't just magically improve. It's not an abstract function of the market. It has a lot to do with financial and personal investment in a lot of hands-on risk and adventure. It can be lots better than the fearful imagine, and it bothers me to no end that among my neighbors who agree with all this, there are hardly any who would identify as conservative, although the most sensible ones see the feckless incompetence and fear of facing urban realities in many liberal politicians and talking heads. There are lost opportunities here in more ways than one.

Jonah, your reader hasn’t pegged anything except perhaps a straw man. Few here, certainly not I, have advocated a set of policies involving greater regulation and higher taxes. God forbid! But neither have I ever said that these are mere matters of taste or preference. I have been most clear on this point.

What the reader misses is what I described here: the need to recover a truly social realm that is neither driven by statist policy prescriptions nor by individualistic prescriptions of taste. I think it is this concept which is proving such a sticking point as it has become so ingrained in us to think either in terms of government action or individual choice, nothing else registers.

When I first heard of Rod’s book, my reaction was similar to Maggie Gallagher’s--I figured it would be mostly about countercultural aestheticism, and that reviewers would skewer it, not unlike Maggie just did. I guess it was the name. But I was very happy when I discovered the book’s argument had tremendous substance, something George Nash recognized in his WSJ review:

Like it or not, Mr. Dreher raises concerns that will not go away. America today is more broadly free and prosperous than any society in human history. We are gloriously "free to choose." But choose what?

But the irony is that without the “restless, dissatisfied search for Something More,” her own wonderful work in the area of marriage will come to nothing, because we can’t rely any longer on the native moral conservatism of the folks who moved to Levittown. They’ve been looking the other way for a long time as their sons and daughters have been aborting, divorcing, indulging in porn, etc. These problems won’t be solved by a simple return to “traditional values,” but only through a genuine spiritual revival that addresses the nihilism that afflicts EVERY aspect of our society.

This reader has the issue pegged:

Rod writes,

"I don’t mind you disagreeing with me; in fact, I’ve learned a lot from critics of the book. What I find maddening to deal with is the persistence of this idea that the kinds of things I and sympathetic bloggers here write about is merely a matter of taste, and has nothing whatsoever to do with ideas and principles. It’s simply not true."

Here's one of many problems I've been having with the overall crunchy-con discussion. Crunchy cons seem to argue either (a) or (b) ----

(a) It's a principle (presumably political), in which case, you generate a set of policies that are consistent with those principles.

However, most of those policies, when they are identified (usually with some reluctance), involve greater power for gov't in the form of taxation and regulation, hardly conservative tools of policy.

Yet when critics note this tendency, most crunchy-cons then fall back to

(b) It's a matter of preference (i.e. taste).

Preferences, and some shaping of preferences of others, are fine things. However, they don't require any tinkering with the free market to achieve, unless of course, one is believe gov't should influence the preferences of others (presumably to make those preferences match their own).

Which is it? (a) or (b) It seems most crunchy-cons would argue along tactic (a) until someone notes that their principles lead to very unconservative policies, and at that moment, they argue with tactic (b).

Rod - I really do hear where you're coming from and I do believe that you have principles and that you believe what you believe in good faith. But the impression I have is derived against a backdrop you leave out. The Crunchy Cons you describe in the foreground are set against a background which -- I believe -- does not exist. As I've complained more than once your description of "mainstream conservatives" is grotesquely unfair and inaccurate. Indeed more unfair and inaccurate than most (though not all) of the mischaracterizations of your position you complain about. You find people you call Crunchy Cons who share lifestyle and consumer choices you find admirable and claim that these people are significantly distinct from "Mainstream conservatives" largely because of their consumer and lifestyle choices. I seem to recall you found a organic butcher or some such who listens to Rush Limbaugh. Well, if she listens to Limbaugh clearly that is not what is new and different about her. So what is? That she digs organic food, of course. Well, organic food must then be very significant, otherwise what makes this person distinct from other conservatives who also listen to Limbaugh? This pattern repeats itself over and over and over again. Conservatives who eschew blue blazers and professional shoes but read agrarian poets and Russell Kirk are "crunchy." Well since reading conservative writers is hardly new or different from any fair understanding of mainstream conservatism what must be very important are these personal tastes in clothing and comestibles.

When people take this bait seriously and criticize your emphasis on "tastes" you share, you claim that mere taste is irrelevant to your argument. Well, if it's irrelevant what exactly is distinct about Crunchy Conservatism? I think you provide answers to that question of varying degrees of persuasiveness, but you never escape the construct you created for yourself.

Indeed, some of your answers to these questions depend on your conjuring of more and larger strawmen. As I've written, I think you write movingly about a popular sense of alienation from contemporary culture that many conservatives feel. But you insist on saying that those who feel this alienation are "crunchy" or you suggest they are not living authentic lives if they aren't crunchy. You may say often that there are plenty of good reasons not to be crunchy, but most of the time when I hear you say it, your reasoning rests on economic necessity. It's okay, you've said, for people not to eat organic food if they can't afford it. But what if you can afford it? There, your answers get murkier.

And so again, people fairly think you're at least insinuating that your tastes are more virtuous than others. I've read your denials. But I've also read scores of emails from people who get the same impression despite your denials. Surely, not all of them suffer from poor reading comprehension skills.

I guarantee you I could pick a half-dozen K-Street lobbyists and corporate executives I know, all of whom make a big money, drive nice cars and wear pinstripe suits who know as much, if not more, about Russell Kirk et al than most of the avowed Crunchy Cons, you included. They are deeply religious, committed family oriented conservatives. I don't say this in a nyah-nyah way, but merely to illustrate that these people agree with much of your analysis of mainstream culture but they'd never dream of calling themselves Crunchy Conservatives because they believe that what distinguishes CCism is that it is a fairly righteous celebration of a lifestyle they don't share and understandably feel excluded from. They'd agree with you and Caleb about all sorts of things about hearth and home, but where you get into public policy (particularly on the environment) and where you get objectively crunchy they'd rebel. You can say that's fine, but if it's fine what, exactly, is the crunchy contribution to crunchy conservatism?

Jonah:

Rod - Come on. I'm not going to second guess your move to Dallas or your choice of houses. But think for a moment how some perfectly decent conservative — or liberal for that matter — might read your choice of picking a house near gun play. Is it really so absurd to think that a reasonable person would choose to live much farther away from gun shots in the sort of planned, pre-fabbed suburban community you hate precisely because he concluded that while nice old bungalows are nice, safe streets are better? One can value all the things you value and conclude that "family values" militate toward a safer environment over pleasing architecture.

I'm sure you don't really disagree, but in your rush to prove the authenticity of your domicile you sound really, really quirky to a lot of us. Quirkiness is good. Quirkiness is valuable. Quirkiness is fun. Why, right now I'm wearing a very quirky hat. But quirkiness is not a foundation for a political philosophy or even a conservative "sentiment" nor is it sufficient grounds to condemn those who don't subscribe to your definition of the good life. A conservative philosophy or sentiment creates room for quirkiness, not the other way around. "The nature of man is intricate," wrote Edmund Burke, "the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs."

Your constant insinuation that Maggie didn't read your book closely enough suggests to me that you don't grasp how many readers conclude in good faith that you've over-read the significance of your personal experience and the experiences of the people you went looking for — and found — who verified what you already believed.

Here’s Jonah in the Corner attacking Jeff Hart’s capitulation on abortion:

As for the "demand" for abortion justifying abortion, this is really outrageous coming from someone who claims to despise populism. Indeed, he rests much of his criticism of Bush on the charge that Bush is a populist. But, simply because a large number of people want something he advocates -- in this case abortion -- pro-life conservatives should simply bow to "reality." By what standard of intellectual rigor should conservatives draw a line between what is right or wrong and what is merely popular if Hart is willing to cave to this logic on abortion?

Then again, when serious questions are dismissed with off the wall non sequiturs, we may presume that there is very little intellectual rigor left.

Jason, a military man, writes:

I think most on the Crunchy Con blog have overlooked Maggie Gallagher's most important (for me) point: the American tradition defies being rooted to one place. As someone who's been in the military all his adult life, this is truer for me than most. The great (maybe mythical) American tradition says that our ancestors left England (or other parts of Europe) to escape being trapped into the same place, occupation, and social class as their fathers. To be American means that I am judged on what I do, not on what my father did. If there are better opportunities for me in other places, I should go. The military forces this on all its members, for reasons more related to readiness than virtue. However, we learn that the place is not what matters, the family does; and one can find a community worth belonging to in any corner of America, given a willingness to look and meet new people. My wife, three girls, and I have lived in ten different places in my 17 years in the Army. In every one we've found a vibrant United Methodist congregation in the local civilian community, a support group in my unit, and a group of friends, civilian and military, that we enjoy spending time with and that share our values. What holds these groups together is not where we live, but what we believe. Tying that to a geographical area cheapens the ideal of America for me.

At the Belmont lecture last night, I met a theology professor who said that he’s been reading this blog, and he agrees somewhat with what the regulars have been saying about houses and neighborhoods, etc., but that he thinks we are too “either/or” about it. He said that he doesn’t see a recognition that people choose to live in the suburbs for all kinds of reasons--and in many cases might not have a realistic choice at all. In that light, I want to say--as I do in the book--that I recognize that fact. In the book, I say that if Julie and I had to depend on the public schools, we’d be suburbanites too. If the crime rate hadn’t gone down in our current neighborhood, ditto. Speaking for myself, I don’t wish to demonize suburban life, only to lament the ways we have chosen, at least to this point, to build our suburbs and the housing stock there, and to suggest that older, forgotten neighborhoods might have something to offer for families who have the ability to consider life there.

Along those lines, here’s an excerpt from a good letter from Stuart in Indiana:

First, I am glad your A&C bungalow has turned out so well. However, many of us burb dwellers started out in an old neighborhood and choose (after careful) deliberation to move. Our first house was a Frank Lloyd Wright inspired mid-century built house built in an old urban neighborhood. It was also a nightmare. After buying it we discovered all sorts of problems which in fixing took away from family time. Now with four boys I thank God I left the fixer upper behind and can devote my time to other things. Maybe, as my boys get older we might venture back that direction.

Please don't paint the suburbs with such a broad brush. Not all suburban neighborhoods or towns are full of shoddy Mcmansions as you suggest. Our new neighborhood sports many of the features your seasoned neighborhood has: narrow streets, houses built close together, porches, sidewalks, etc. It also features options that I think are an improvement over some of the older neighborhoods, such as dead end cul-de-sacs that keep out speeding teenagers and cruisers. My neighborhood also has public walking and biking trails, public green spaces, fishing ponds (that my kids and I love), a basketball court, and many other features. In short, it was built with family activities in mind.

In fact, I just may be lucky, but I'd compare my little suburban neighborhood to any other neighborhood. Just last night on an unseasonably warm March night for our part of the country (it hit 70), one neighbor was out on his driveway practicing with his bluegrass band, a group of boys were playing kick ball in the cul-de-sack, several of us were washing our cars or cleaning out our garages, and eventually a few beers (micros even) were popped amongst the adults while we talked about NCAA seeding.

I too am a small business owner. After a stint as a lawyer, I got into the retail wine business and love it. It pains me to see so much of the wine business has gone global. You might be surprised to know how many of those interesting little wines you find are actually slick packaging by multinational wine companies trying to hide behind the aura of the little old family vineyard. (Ever notice the recent trend of what we call critter wines....Yellow Tail, Dog House, 3 Blind Moose, etc.)

Last year I was talking to the son of a California family vineyard owner. He was telling me that multinationals had bid up the price of vineyard land in his area such that his family's vineyards were worth a hundred million dollars on the open market. His vineyard and winery only grossed about $10 million a year. Yet, his family was so devoted to the art and craft of wine making, from the soil to the bottle if you will, that none of them were inclined to sell.

In fact, your book has given me a business idea. We are currently building a website to sell our wares over the net. I think I am going to devote a whole section on the site to family and small business wine producers--producers that see value in the practice of their craft and not just the bottom line.

Just back in from Belmont Abbey College--what a great place, and what good people--and getting caught up on my e-mail. Dave from Georgia sends in a novel “canary in the coalmine” sign for how you know your downtown is dying:

Downtowns are dead or dying all over the country, and have been for over a generation. Easy to blame Wal-Mart, but the fact is this trend was happening long before Mister Sam ever got out of Arkansas. Now, of course, they all want block-grants for redevelopment (my old home town in Pennsylvania is now on its third downtown makeover, via "free money" from the federal government, with no discernable rise in business).

Go to any county set in any county, and the downtown is the courthouse, banks, lawyers' offices, and the town newspaper office. This provides the unholy alliance to "revitalize" downtown -- the federal government will give you money to refurbish an old building downtown into a money losing coffeehouse, but won't give you a dime to put in a Ruby Tuesday's out on Highway 53 -- go figure.

The symbol for smalltown decline -- a karate studio on Main Street. As soon as a karate studio moves into an old furniture store or clothing chop, throw dirt over your downtown, because it is dead, dead, dead.

Rod wrote:

Is what really a very important question? God? Family? Architecture? Liturgy? Birkenstocks? Organic chickens (which I understand to mean "the kind of food we eat")? No, Maggie, footwear is not an important question, and people who actually read my book know that I don't make an issue of it, except as an example of how I let a silly cultural prejudice against a brand of shoes keep me from trying out a product that has given me good service. So okay, footwear is not important. But all the rest of it, yeah, it's important.

Rod - Come on. I'm not going to second guess your move to Dallas or your choice of houses. But think for a moment how some perfectly decent conservative -- or liberal for that matter -- might read your choice of picking a house near gun play. Is it really so absurd to think that a reasonable person would choose to live much farther away from gun shots in the sort of planned, pre-fabbed suburban community you hate precisely because he concluded that while nice old bungalos are nice, safe streets are better? One can value all the things you value and conclude that "family values" militate toward a safer environment over pleasing architecture.

I'm sure you don't really disagree, but in your rush to prove the authenticity of your domicile you sound really, really quirky to a lot of us. Quirkiness is good. Quirkiness is valuable. Quirkiness is fun. Why, right now I'm wearing a very quirky hat. But quirkiness is not a foundation for a political philosophy or even a conservative "sentiment" nor is it sufficient grounds to condemn those who don't subscribe to your definition of the good life. A conservative philosophy or sentiment creates room for quirkiness, not the other way around. "The nature of man is intricate," wrote Edmund Burke, "the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs."

Your constant insinuation that Maggie didn't read your book closely enough suggests to me that you don't grasp how many readers conclude in good faith that you've over-read the significance of your personal experience and the experiences of the people you went looking for -- and found -- who verified what you already believed.

Today's posts have made clear that those of us who consider ourselves conservative have some important choices to make. Fifty years ago Clinton Rossiter differentiated among different kinds of conservative, referring to its mainstream as "stand-patters." Is that what we want to be? Is the higher good to which we as conservatives are devoted "more of the same?" That seems to be what those who dismiss Rod's book are implying. "The old world is gone, get used to the new one, embrace it and move on."

No thank you.

The deeper tradition of conservatism always has stood for something far more substantial than present-ism. What Edmund Burke defended against the French Jacobins; what Alexis de Tocqueville defended against the radicals of his own day in Europe and mindless levellers everywhere; what Russell Kirk defended against the mass homogenization of post-war liberalism; what William F. Buckley, jr. defended against the atheist, materialist professorate was the broad tradition of Western civilization. It was a society in which the true, the good, and the beautiful all were recognized as permanent things beyond price. It was a society in which we sought to join with one another in leading a life of virtue. Some political and economic structures are better at serving such goals than others, but these higher goals are the most important things, the things that actually make life worth living. And to simply say "that's all gone" is to abdicate one's responsibility as a human being, an American, and a member of one's neighborhood, parish, synagogue, workplace, family, school, and all the other associations of one's life, to work for a recovery of a reason to live--not just a way of enjoying oneself, but a reason for existing.

The problem today, of course, is that so much of our tradition has been crushed under the weight of materialism, selfishness, and cynicism. But that should not mean that we simply join in the party. When Burke criticized the French for giving in to the impulse to tear down their civilization, he didn't just say "too bad;" he made clear that, even in the worst of times, we have a viable option: to look back in our own traditions for healthy, virtuous elements, be they institutions, beliefs or practices, that we can revive and build on.

Americans still love to associate with one another, they still value decency, they still believe in God, they still want to live in actual towns and attend actual RELIGIOUS services. That's a start, and a far better start than pretending the 1960s was a hurricane that came from nowhere and left us with no choice but to pretend everything is fine, lest we lose power, prestige and money.

Maggie Gallagher writes:

There is something movingly pathetic in watching the Drehers drive through different religious identities, for example, searching for one that "fits." Worshipping at a Lebanese Maronite (Catholic) Church, for example, because they like the taste of ancient tradition, even if they are neither Lebanese nor Maronite. Tradition itself becomes a kind of consumption item, to be produced and consumed by crunchy cons.

It was an Eastern-rite parish, where the aesthetically rich, awe-filled fifth-century liturgy was celebrated partly in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, and the priests wer edecidedly uninterested in trendiness. We couldn't take the smarmy, white-bread, middle-class American masses at the Roman-rite parishes around us, where the liturgies were washed out and banal, and the moral and theological grandeur of the historical Christian faith was discarded in favor of a piety that demanded no more of you than that you feel good about yourself. This was a form of Catholic Christianity that demanded more from us, and because of that, it was more rewarding. And it seemed so much more solid than Our Lady of What's Happening Now around the corner, where the priests embarrassed themselves trying to be hip and relevant.

The key thing is, we didn't become members of Our Lady of Lebanon parish because it sounded like a neat experiment in religious tourism.
We did so because we are conservative Catholics, and we were hungry for worship in a parish where we could find the real, deal, be it in English, Latin or Aramaic.

She writes:

A true traditionalism would not be represented by people who move to Dallas, buy a nice bungalow and invite friends over for tasty organic cooked food. It would be led by people who advocate returning to the place you were born, where your kith and kin also live, because that is really where you belong, the thing in which your very self is rooted.

This, from Maggie, is a useful insight: "This the pathos of American
traditionalism: They have to create their own."

Well, yeah, but what else are you offering, Maggie? Opening cans of food and microwaving them because that's what Mom did? Enduring banal liturgies and ugly hymns when something richer, deeper and older is available, only because hey, that's the "tradition" handed down to us from the 1960s?

Is there room at the great conservative table for people who love God, family, Arts and Crafts architecture, ancient liturgy, Birkenstocks and organic chickens?

Sure, Rod, I'll dine with you anytime. But is this really a very important question?

A blogger:

An important point should be made here: Podhoretz used the word ideologically in a rather clumsy way that later allowed him to accuse the "crunchies" of being self-conscious ideologues. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. A man who lives according to a vision of the good life does not live ideologically. He lives according to principles, or better still we might say simply that he lives virtuously. There is something programmatic and artificial about living "ideologically" that distinguishes it, and most people are capable of recognising it when they see it. But that is not what the "crunchies" do, and it is not what Podhoretz can be referring to when he applies it to them.

Ideology is one of those words, like fascist (and perhaps conservative!), whose original meaning is so far gone and lost for most people that it would be easier to retire the word and start over with some new term. Nowadays many people, including apparently John Podhoretz, think that it means consciously adhering to ideas or principles (which, apparently, he thinks the vast majority of Americans does not do). If Podhoretz thinks that someone must be able to articulate and defend a philosophy justifying his way of life to be considered as someone who adheres to principles or ideas, he is kidding himself.

Men reproduce or fail to reproduce customs and traditions all the time depending on the meaning these things have for them (this is not to deny that they are shaped and formed by those traditions in ways they do not always notice or know). In myriad ways in everyday life, people consciously adhere to or depart from their traditions. Traditions endure, among other reasons, because they fulfill so many functions that we do not even recognise that we need until they are no longer being provided, but this does not make our adherence to the tradition any less conscious or deliberate. If we cannot articulate a reason why we do something, we nonetheless do understand the reason at some level. This is why the details of everyday life are a vital part of realising the common good. It is by these customs and habits supposedly "unthinkingly" repeated, but in reality consciously embraced, that traditions live or die.

One of the things that distinguishes the ideologue from the man of principle is that the former scarcely has substantial ideas, or when he does have substantial ideas he is perfectly willing to contort, distort and manipulate them to serve those in power. It is in that sense, I believe, that Kirk pejoratively used the term ideology and it was against that kind of ideology that he set up conservatism as the antithesis and antidote. It is, incidentally, one of the principal criticisms of the book against modern conservatism that it has become just this kind of coat-holding lackey for Republican Party interests and has engaged in the contortions and betrayals of real conservatism to facilitate the party's exercise of power. The "crunchy" idea, as I understand it, is in its simplest form an attempt to correct that perversion of conservatism and to seek the Good once more.

How can you start loving a community--which involves being settled, committed, even disciplined to a place--if one has to search high and low to find a community amenable to such settling, one that has those extant traditions or the resources to begin new ones? Doesn't that give the game away right from the beginning, having made it a matter of individual, abstract choice?

I don't think it does, it one needs to think carefully about what one is doing. Consider holidays, for example.

It is popular for some people to assume that, since modern scholarship has made it clear to us that all holidays were simply "invented" at one point or another, that must mean they can be revised or dismissed willy-nilly; it's all just a construct, after all. It is true that we understand the past, that we look upon the ways in which we mark the calendar and honor the seasons, differently than did people many generations ago who had far fewer options, far fewer cultural resources, than we do today. But I don't think the increased subjective awareness which attends our own rituals and observances means that our appreciation of them is categorically different from what came before; we may well be consciously engaged in a little "invention" when we celebrate holidays (or settle in a community, or change our consumer habits, or whatever) today, but whatever we come up with need NOT be an arbitrary invention, because our inventing can very possibly be a kind of adaptive remembering, a connecting that is--potentially at least--every bit as morally grounding as that which was experienced by those who went through the same process as the seasons turned a hundred or even a thousand years ago.

One of my girls' favorite holiday books is Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving, by Laurie Halse Anderson and Matt Faulkner. It very entertainingly tells the story of Sarah Hale, the abolitionist, editor and social reformer, who spent thirty years writing letters and publishing articles, trying to get the U.S. government to officially acknowledge (and thus hopefully resuscitate) Thanksgiving, the observance of which in the mid-19th century was slowing dying out. She finally succeeded, and the book makes President Lincoln's declaration of a national Thanksgiving holiday out to be Sarah's greatest triumph. I think we can take a lesson from that.

Sure, you could cynically dismiss Hale as a sentimental busybody--even an "elitist," trying to inject a little "crunchy" culture and ritual into an America hell-bent on war and the industrial revolution. But maybe she was more; maybe she was committed to helping her country engage in a little creative remembering. The fact that what she accomplished was, strictly speaking, a political invention doesn't, I think, take anything away from the REAL traditions and connections it made possible for all Americans.

No crunchy political program or policy is going to be sufficient, and none will be above critique: the CC blog has been filled with numerous good arguments about how certain efforts to preserve neighborhoods, equalize families, promote farming and community agriculture, get away from the corporate rat-race, etc., can have harmful, unintended consequences. Because something comes through a process of adaptation and invention, it can always be reconsidered. But I don't think the simple FACT that adaptation and invention are involved in our attempts to recover and recreate communities and traditions makes them, somehow, morally bankrupt.

Gallagher suggests that it's too late; we live in a world of choice, and Dreher's attempt to "abstractly" choose something more durable in that a choice-driven environment is laughable. She's wrong.

Reader Kevin writes:

I see Jonah has all but dared you to praise Philip Kennicott's piece in the WaPo today.

This crunchy-sympathizer will be happy to take a shot at it, even though it veers off into topics which should be more fully covered in future weeks.

Kennicott starts uneven, and finishes ridiculous, but in the middle he makes a solid point--a crunchy point, even!--that needs making.

“Although he acknowledged, for himself, the intrinsic value of art, and used words such as "enrich" and "treasure" and "timeless" (buzzwords all for the intrinsic position), the thrust of Safire's talk was about the arts' instrumental value. And that now seems to be the mainstream view, that art is instrumental in a pragmatic way that it is good for making children better at other more useful things, like math and reading (which everyone values)."

I work at a major state university, and I can tell you that contemporary higher education is shot through with instrumentalism. Even the faculty seem to have lost their faith in the inherent value of higher learning, especially the liberal arts. (In the social sciences where I work, for instance, the majority of the faculty works steadily to transmogrify their disciplines into something more closely resembling the hard sciences...something that is quantifiably "true" and much more "useful".) And of course the great majority of the students are simply here to get their tickets punched--something which is not their fault, since in a more sensible society at least half of them wouldn't be compelled to go to college in the first place.

It's a sad state of affairs for a true academic geek like me, who cut his teeth on the classics at an institution that proudly proclaims the "uselessness" of its curriculum in the practical sense, that relies on an ordered leisure (see Josef Pieper) for the proper formation of its students...that actually has a real live curriculum and deeply thought-out educational philosophy.

Now if Jonah hadn't dared Crunchydom, I wouldn't bother quoting Kennicott or give him any credit for this insight. For in the very next paragraph, he actually invokes "Dead Poets Society"...and not long thereafter, he completes a strange and rapid journey from denouncing what he sees as Safire's instrumentalism, to neutrally invoking "liberal" instrumentalism, to demanding ever-more épater le bourgeois in the most tiresome Leftist-agitator style. What an incoherent mess.

But he's still dead on in the passage cited above. Or so I think. Would Jonah disagree?

I dunno. I didn’t read the Kennicott piece and am in too much of a rush to--travelling again. But as Jonah predicted that by day’s end there would be something on the CC blog praising the Kennicott piece, I wouldn’t want to disappoint.

As you might expect, I found Gallagher’s review insightful on a number of fronts:

A true traditionalism would not be represented by people who move to Dallas, buy a nice bungalow and invite friends over for tasty organic cooked food. It would be led by people who advocate returning to the place you were born, where your kith and kin also live, because that is really where you belong, the thing in which your very self is rooted.

March 14, 2006

By Maggie Gallagher

Funny that Caleb Stegall should seek to impose a loyalty test and oath on me... It seems like I was editing a magazine a decade ago that was pro-life and anti-gay-marriage while you were building your log cabin...

First, I didn’t say that everyone lives ideologically, Stuart Buck did, and I agreed with him. As I understood Stuart, his point was that people’s priorities are revealed in the choices they make. Sometimes people don’t have a choice, and sometimes priorities collide and prudential considerations that could tip either way are introduced, but the basic Augustinian insight remains valid: people act in accordance with their deepest loves.

I would like to know whether Podhoretz’s claims to intellectual modesty (i.e., not presuming to judge other people’s decisions) extends to issues like abortion and homosexuality. If they do, he should just say so and we will know where things stand. If they don’t, he should say why. If, as he appears to suggest, it is out of some kind of adherence to tradition then he would have to extend the same license to others (such as Rod) who also claim recourse to tradition as the source of their immodest intellectual judgments. And if he claims that “tradition” opposes abortion or homosexual marriage yet has nothing to say about strip malls and sprawl (all of which have gained widespread purchase on the American soul only in the past forty years), we will know he is not serious about this discussion in the least.

Caleb Stegall says everybody lives ideologically. No, actually, everybody does not live ideologically. Actually, Caleb, 97 percent of people do not live ideologically. Yes, it's true that eople do live according to commonly accepted social standards, but they are not making conscious, deliberate choices to do so. That's what I mean by "living ideologically"--if Crunchy Conservatism is anything, it's a form of self-conscious living and therefore entirely different from the quotidian. Which is fine. But you seem to presume that your fellow 300 million Americans are capable of being self-conscious in this way, and that's just absurd.

Rod says people should not live in as much house as they can afford, because otherwise they might be able to live next door to their brother. Well, I have news for you, buddy--many people don't want to live next door to their brother.

And Rod, you say I have no problem telling people how to live.
Actually, that kind of social criticism is not what I do. I don't know how people ought to live. What I do know is that hasty or wholesale revisions of traditional morality and moral structures usually have horrible consequences, and that traditions are traditions for a reason. Caleb Stegall seems to think that such a view is a "standardless ethos of personal choice." Actually, it's a form of intellectual modesty.

We ought to bring a little more rigor to this discussion of what makes one a “good person”--and by extension what makes for a good society. For example, the emailer below thinks that strip malls, sprawl, and mcmansions are bad things, but also thinks that pointing out the value judgments implicitly adopted by those who live there is incredibly offensive. In this emailer’s view, these people are good people who have, apparently, behaved quite foolishly having been bamboozled. What can one do with this? It is a basic rejection of the foundation of western ethical thinking which must begin with Augustine’s insight that “when there is a question as to whether a man is good, one does not ask what he believes... but what he loves.”

I don’t think there is nearly so much bamboozling going on as some who wish to avoid making moral judgment would like to think. People basically know what they want--they know what they love. If the state, market, culture, etc., make it easy for them to pursue these things as the path of least resistance, so much the better. And as Frederica has pointed out, our society has essentially decided that what we love best of all is to give unrestrained expression to our basest appetites. It is true, people usually don’t explicitly calculate the naked truth of their decisions--human nature is too clever and deceitful for that. However, as Iris Murdoch put it, “At crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.” This is because our choices don’t spring into being ex nihilo, but rather come out of the order or disorder of the soul. The most fundamental ethical question, then, is: What do you love? What does our society love? Everything else--including the choices that we make long before they are outwardly made manifest--flows from that.

The emailer with friends in big houses has less reason to disagree with Stuart Buck (and vice versa) than might at first appear. Certainly MOST people did not move to the exurbs simply to show off. Rather, the vast bulk of people in these areas (and I grew up exclusively in middle class exurbs) see themselves as forced to commute long distances for the sake of their families. My father commuted an hour and a half every work day because he believed he couldn't afford a nice house in a nice neighbohood with good schools any closer in. The very real problem of urban decay, with crime, drugs, lawlessness and simple low, politically motivated standards, has chased many, many decent Americans out of our cities.

Rod himself recognized this in Crunchy Cons when he noted that he was able to move into the city only because schooling wasn't an issue for his kids--they will be homeschooled. I would hope that most if not all crunchies recognize that what is called for is not merely a moral choice--give up some acreage and square-footage in exchange for family and community. Rather, what is needed, and what many of the people Rod writes about are practicing, is a rebuilding of community in the wasteland of post-60s urban (and rural) America. This is not an easy thing. For example, I certainly wouldn't try it in downtown Detroit, where the city government remains a horror. Instead I moved into a "new" neotraditional neighborhood. It's not perfect, either. Again, hard choices must be made, and the mobility of our generation makes them even harder. But the market shows that people have a desire for real towns--their property values skyrocket compared to typical subdivisions.

But it seems to me a good thing to both present people with the argument that there is something better than strip malls and McMansions AND to work on changing laws and policies so that we can recapture more urban areas for good working and middle class families (and the worst victims in Detroit were just such families, and black families in particular who had a harder time escaping) and make it possible to build and rebuild in a more humane fashion.

I’d like to address JPod’s point on his own terms. It’s true that most people don’t act self-consciously on the basis of ideology, or a deeply-held philosophy of life, and this has been so throughout history. People have typically inherited cultures and social environments that were either shaped by elites, or the inherent limitations of life (which had the effect of keeping things on a human scale).

But just because cultural authorities no longer dictate architectural styles or plan towns based on cultural or transcendent values, that doesn’t mean that democracy and the “market are just passive recorders of fixed human wants and desires. There is plenty of room for creative action on the part of government leaders and entrepreneurs.

The writings of solid conservatives like George Gilder have shown that a creative entrepreneur motivated by a noble vision can tap into deeply-held human needs that people themselves aren’t aware of. The most famous example, of course, is Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, two (mostly) crunchy guys who co-founded Apple computers because they literally wanted to change the world. The famous quote attributed to Ken Olsen, Chairman of Digital Equipment Corporation, that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home," while misleading because it was taken out of context, does capture the fact that at that time the potential demand for personal computers wasn’t showing up in market research studies to the degree anticipated by Jobs and Wozniak and other visionaries, who had the imagination to probe deeply into reality because they were on a mission, not just passive responders to “market demand.”

Libertarian conservatives need to get beyond the silly idea that to “see a deeper reality” is just a disguise for liberal elitist paternalism. The fact is, we don’t always know what we want, and we need visionaries to shine a light on our deepest desires. This is not Marxist “false consciousness,” but a basic Christian truth. Conservatives need to encourage creative thinking and acting, especially in regard to our physical environment, not slap it down just because there might be liberals around who also want to join in.

I’m on board with crunchy conservatism, but to suggest, as Stuart Buck does, that in choosing to live ideologically, we choose between family/community and big house that impresses people, is so offensive I don’t know where to begin. Yes, I believe we all live ideologically. Yet most folks aren’t even aware of it. I live in the Deep South, and I know well the neighborhoods north of Atlanta and south of Birmingham – middle to upper class, full of big homes and strip malls. I also know that many of those homes are full of good people who raise good families and are completely humble in their approach to life. I also believe that those good folks are inadvertently harming our communities by moving so far away from the city. They’re kind people contributing to urban sprawl and nasty traffic, but it’s not as though they sat back in the recliner and, after lighting a cigar with a one hundred dollar bill, decided “to hell with the traffic and the family...I want a big house to impress the neighbors.” To suggest as much is foolishly naïve. The point we should be trying to convey to our friends and families in these subdivisions is that however nice their lives might be, it is a dangerous thing for all of us to live that way, generation after generation.

Stuart Buck emails me this:

Podhoretz says: "People live where in some proximity to where they work, and they want as much home as they can afford. They're willing to brave traffic and, yes, even some appalling aesthetics to have the kind of home they want. Once again we see the key contradiction between the contributors to this blog and the vast majority of ordinary Americans. You guys live ideologically."

*Everybody* lives ideologically. Unless you make decisions at random, you're going to live your life according to your ideas about what is important.

For some, the ideology is, "Get as big a house as we can. If it's far from where I work (hence less family time due to commuting); if it puts us in a stressful situation due to the size of the mortgage -- all of that is of no concern. It's big. The granite counters will impress guests, if we ever have any. And the neighborhood is prestigious. That's what matters."

And for some the ideology is, "Time with family is more important than getting as much home as we can afford. That means being openminded towards older neighborhoods that are closer to my workplace, prestigious or not."

Or perhaps the ideology is, "I want a more genuine neighborhood. A real community is much harder where most of the people are never home (always working or commuting), and are just living there temporarily until they find something better -- another neighborhood, or a job in another city. I want a neighborhood where the residents have been and will be there more permanently."

None of these values are absolute, of course, and they might come into conflict: Maybe the closest neighborhood is the most expensive or doesn't feel like a genuine community. But it's always a good thing to search our hearts and ask whether we are truly living our lives with the proper emphasis on family and community, or whether we are too often motivated by greed and prestige.

Podhoretz, however, effectively claims that it is "the sheerest snobbery" even to ask whether some people value greed and prestige too highly. This description is bizarrely Orwellian.

Jon, you're actually making some of my points. I'm sorry, I think I was being too cryptic.

Yes, Charleston houses have shot through the roof. (The house my dad bought in 1960 for $33,000 was recently on the market again for $5 million.) Over the decades, rising prices have nudged out native Charlestonians, and their places were taken by wealthy folks from the Nawth. Unsurprisingly, this has made the city more liberal than it used to be. The kind of people who value living in a setting like this are not necessarily conservative.

I was inviting Rod to spell out exactly why he claims the old-house, old-neighborhood sensibility as emblematic of Crunchy Conservatism. I think the answer is that conservatives conserve (they care for the Old) and they value the Small, Local, and Particular (homes are smaller and cheek-by-jowl with neighbors). It's not a sensibility that must automatically be ceded to the liberals. Of course, none of us can afford to live in old Charleston, but the same principle would apply in more affordable zip codes.

But I also wanted to explore why Rod has to recommend this choice of home setting in the first place. Why is it that people generally prefer a different arrangement of homes and neighborhoods, judging by what's being built? A reader sends three reasons why our cities don't look like Europe's, and the first two suggest that the minute people can spread out and have more privacy, they take it. They also prefer the biggest house they can get, so there's more privacy inside, away from other family members. Is the cozy community something people know they're supposed to want, but in reality would prefer to be left alone?

"Nobody wants to live in old Charleston" was an inept attempt to express this metaphorically. Yes, there are more people who want to live in that square mile than there are houses to go around. But the kinds of homes and neighborhoods being built are on a very different scale. I'm curious about what there is in human nature that, frankly, doesn't want to stroll the sidewalks and wave at the neighbors on their porches. What is the Crunchy Con idea of Home up against, exactly? Is it something new, or a part of human nature?

I'm out the door in a second to fly to North Carolina to inflict my elitist sensibilities on the good people of Belmont Abbey College. There will be Benedictine monks present, and I'll be sleeping in an actual abbey tonight. I hope they're the beer-brewing kind! Anyway, y'all rock on today...

JPod:

Which brings up another point: The idea that people "choose" where they live. It's never as simple as that. People live where in some proximity to where they work, and they want as much home as they can afford.They're willing to brave traffic and, yes, even some appalling aesthetics to have the kind of home they want.

JPod:

Once again we see the key contradiction between the contributors to this blog and the vast majority of ordinary Americans. You guys live ideologically. You make choices that gratify you because they represent a fulfillment of ideas you hold. Most people don't live this way, and to presume that they should is, well, the sheerest snobbery.

A reader who requests anonymity writes:

To answer the emailer's question about why our cities don't look like Europe's, here are three big reasons:

1. No need to stay intra mures. European cities were designed for defensive purposes until the advent of gunpowder weapons made walls less relevant in the 1600s/1700s. The population density could be quite amazing back then based on the need to defend against marauders/foreign armies (cf. Edinburgh). The US was created almost entirely after walls were no longer necessary. (That's why there's a Wall Street on Manhattan but not too many other places.)

2. Mass use of the automobile. The more walkable, eye-pleasing American cities were all built before truly widespread automobile ownership, starting after WWII (compare Houston to Boston). Almost all European cities were built before even Boston.

3. The secondary mortgage market. There's about 11 different kinds of buildings that are fungible enough to have their mortgages bundled and resold on the American secondary mortgage market. If you build a truly original building, it can't get financing on nearly as favorable terms because the mortgage risk can't be remarketed and spread over a lot of a lenders. Europe's lenders don't have the option of insisting on cookie-cutter properties, though a lot of new development on the edge does tend to be that way.

A lot of this sort of analysis is covered in Spiro Kostof's The City Shaped and The City Assembled, both fascinating books.

Frederica complains that nobody wants to live in Old Charleston anymore because they'd prefer spanking new kitchens and more space between houses. Hello? According to what I've read, houses in Old Charleston sell for millions of dollars. That suggests a) people do want to live there and that b) almost nobody can afford to live there. Which brings up another point: The idea that people "choose" where they live. It's never as simple as that. People live where in some proximity to where they work, and they want as much home as they can afford. They're willing to brave traffic and, yes, even some appalling aesthetics to have the kind of home they want. Once again we see the key contradiction between the contributors to this blog and the vast majority of ordinary Americans. You guys live ideologically. You make choices that gratify you because they represent a fulfillment of ideas you hold. Most people don't live this way, and to presume that they should is, well, the sheerest snobbery.

March 13, 2006

Stuart Buck has a great blog postwondering why there isn’t more New Urbanism, given that people’s preferences seem to indicate a market for what it offers.

Kevin, I know what you mean by "rural sprawl" -- I see it when I visit my son and his family north of Atlanta. Those who haven't seen such landscapes can hardly guess how peculiarly depressing they are, as you travel twenty or thirty miles and keep seeing the same elaborate brick gateways framing the same clusters of faux-elegant houses, each with a buzz-word-generated name that involves "Oak" or "Brook" or "Orchard" or some other landscape feature that was destroyed to make way for construction. In between nothing but upscale shopping, kudzu, and the rare straggling farm. It could be on a windshield video loop, and it's curiously oppressive: no matter how fast you drive, you'll never escape.

But in answer to your first question, somebody *does* think this is beautiful. They *do* want to live here. They don't want to live in old Charleston (where I grew up, btw) because the neighbors are too close. They don't care about building for durability, because they're going to be moving on in five years anyway. When they move, they'll want the latest windows, the latest counters, and any house more than 20 years old is embarrassingly out of fashion. Old Charleston looks nice on a postcard but they don't want to live there. They'll take planned obsolescence any day over the upkeep headaches of a quirky older place. (For example, I wrestle with clunky old aluminum storm windows every season, because that's the price of keeping the wonderful, wavery original windows. The next owner will certainly rip it all out for something "efficient"). Sad but true: today's sprawl is exactly what a great many Americans yearn for.

Rod's quote from Kunstler makes a great point, that this unlovely, throwaway landscape is not one that anyone would become attached to. "It's the *land*, Katie Scarlett O'Hara" makes no sense here.

Still, as much as I love living in an old home in an old neighborhood, I don't think that this in itself creates a love of the land, much less a community. Most of these houses have front porches, but we don't really visit with each other. We have our own lives, our own friends. The center of community is no longer geographic, but based in common interests. And public life feels so overexposed that when people get home from the day they want isolation. Look at how popular pay-at-the-pump and ATM's are; people are looking for ways to *not* engage with others. They want a massive shield of a home and no front porch. I don't know how you get around this.

Graeme writes to make a very important point:

To take one point out of your sprawl emailer's discussion, I wanted to highlight why everyone is so eager to commercialise public space: it is the only way of preserving any sort of standards in public space. To ensure that beggars, loons, the obscene, etc do not befoul the common space, it must be a private space (and even then there are restrictions based on public accommodation laws).

Where once the community could express itself through the municipal government and the local police, now this must be devolved to merchants, as they are the only ones with the power to act. A business can erect a Christmas display, where many governments can not, or at least not without a protracted legal battle. Merchants can mandate civilised behaviour, while a town has no control over behaviour in the square except against that which is criminal (and can withstand constitutional scrutiny and much litigation from the Anti-American Civil Liberties Union).

Do not blame the capitalists, for they are acting to protect traditional values. Blame instead the New Deal and all Progressives for the evil that they have consciously wrought.

James from Phoenix writes:

Just ordered your book and am anxiously awaiting for it to arrive and I love the thoughts expressed on your blog so far. I studied city planning in college and enjoy hypothesizing about new demographic trends. I do not know if you have addressed this in your book, but have you seen any trends among Gen-Xer's? I am from the first wave of Gen-Xer's to hit the housing market. Grew up as a punk in high school and grunge in college, yet now find myself conservative, active in church and raising a family in a modern style ranch house in the city of Phoenix. You'll never catch me in a pair of Birkenstocks and I hate pretty much anything associated with hippies. I don't know the politics of most of the people on these sites, but they are a great introduction to a growing number of Gen-Xer's who do not want to live in the suburbs. Check out www.atomic-ranch.com , www.modernphoenix.net, and www.lottaliving.com. These sites are the ones that I frequent and focus more on west coast and Phoenix area mid-century houses.

As the commute into central Phoenix is now about an hour away from the new subdivisions, many people are starting a reverse migration into Phoenix from the suburbs. Personally, I do not ever want to buy a new house. Other than the usual quirks associated with a 40 year old house (plumbing and electrical mostly), I have a well made house constructed of concrete block, a yard twice the size of what you get with a new house and have all of my shopping needs with five minutes of my house.

I, too, am in the first generation of Xers to get into the housing market, though my entry was delayed by living in NYC for five years, where I couldn’t have hoped to have afforded anything. When Julie and I looked for a house, we feared that all our grinching about not wanting to live in a far-flung suburb would be for naught. We didn’t have much money for a down payment, and just about anything in the city of Dallas was unaffordable. Because we are doing a homeschooling partnership with a small local Protestant school, we didn’t have to worry about the lousy public schools in the city of Dallas, which is why so many parents head for the burbs. So we bought a rehabbed 1914 bungalow in a gentrifying downtown neighborhood for a song. We seem to have gotten in on a reverse-migration wave as well. If schools aren’t a question for you because you homeschool, or can afford private school, then you might consider moving to one of these old, human-scaled neighborhoods in your city – if they’re still affordable. I love what Rachel Balducci and her family are doing. Her parents were part of a group of Catholic families in the 1970s who all put together and bought several houses in a blighted neighborhood, fixed them up and lived together in a sort of intentional community. Rachel, her husband Paul and their sons all live in the same neighborhood now. They say you just can’t replace the bonds of community that were laid down by their parents. I’ll write more about this in a bit.

Kevin raises deeply important issues that receive far too little serious
consideration these days. On the first, our ancestors' ability to make
beautiful, liveable cities, I would defer to others, except to point out
that there is something in each and every one of us, however far buried
these days, that desires a decent, pleasing community. Robert Nisbet wrote
of how the Quest for Community always is with us, only in corrupt form when
its true form becomes unobtainable.

Which brings me to the second point, concerning why it is that we have
sprawl. And it isn't because the free market demands it. Far from it.
Only a few cities do not have zoning laws, and almost all those that do make
real towns, with main streets of shops that have apartments/condos above
them, spiraling out through townhouses and neighborhoods with businesses
mixed in, illegal. Rural sprawl, of which there is a great deal where I
live, has become a particular problem, and can be traced most directly to
government action. Local boards try to stave off suburbanization by having
large lot requirements--e.g. all houses must be on at least 10 acres. Then
the property values get really high, and the pressure builds to lower the
lot size, until you have a bunch of houses on 2 acres or so, sitting in
former corn fields, surrounded by nothing except other 2 acre lots and an
incredibly nasty commute over country roads never intended to carry the
amount of traffic now using them.

Sadly, few townships or counties are willing even to consider the
traditional answer to the problem of increased demand for housing, shopping,
etc. Very few are willing to build new towns. They would have to change
their zoning laws radically, and rethink their aversion to town life, which
they associate with all the bad things brought by big, liberal cities
(crime, high taxes, decaying infrastructure). Even if they did think of
this, however, the laws in most states make it very easy for the nearby city
to annex any town they build, and very, very difficult to incorporate a new
town. So, in classic fashion, you have the government on one side, usually
run by various liberals who see continuing, heavy handed regulation as the
answer to everything, and on the other side voracious developers. And the
public, we the people in our local communities, left nowhere.

It's actually a fairly clear problem with a fairly clear solution, but first
people have to admit that a few big developers do not a free market make,
and that we need to change the laws so that entrepreneurs and communities
can come together to make something decent for all of us.

Kevin writes from small-town Georgia:

There are two thoughts that I particularly have in mind as we come to the Home chapter.

1) While post-automotive and post-modern wastelands continue to be thrown up all over Europe, same as here, there remain many cities and towns with historic cores that have survived down the years. While not all of them are Bruges or Dubrovnik, there is still a whole lot of beauty and grace and humanity to be found in every corner of the continent. (And in the historic core of, say, Savannah or Charleston for that matter.)

I think we could all point to various reasons as to why such buildings and towns probably stopped being built. But what I have never been able to wrap my mind around is how and why they *were* in fact built, in so many places over such extended periods of time.

To have been made so durable, so pleasing to the eye; to be arranged in such a way that one longs to live in that space--just what made this happen? The economics of, say, creating Venice seem nonsensical from today's point of view; and so much of the culture, particularly the aesthetics and values and priorities, that birthed these places is barely remembered now. But if we can come to better understand how these places came about, perhaps we would have a better chance of someday doing likewise.

2) Everyone is familiar with the issue of suburban and exurban sprawl. But what I see just as much of, driving around Georgia, is rural sprawl. Downtown is dead or dying even in small towns that are over an hour from the nearest big city, and over a half hour from the nearest Interstate. It doesn't even require a Wal-Mart--though of course that is sometimes a major contributing factor.

Maybe you know immediately what I'm talking about; but in case not, I'll mention some details about what I've been seeing. The fundamental problem seems to be that so much residential and commercial development is spread ever-further out of town. Some of this takes the form of the rural version of McMansions: a random pod of hastily-built houses plopped in the middle of a field. Other residential development is more piecemeal, and more closely approximates the modern rural ideal: a house on a big huge lot, either on or close to one of the main highways out of town; few and/or distant neighbors; the promise of splendid isolation. (Physical isolation, that is; the satellite dish and high-speed internet connection remove any danger of isolation from mass culture.) On the commercial side, every business will similarly want its own separate plot of land somewhere along that main highway out of town...preferably along the same stretch as the Wal-Mart Supercenter, if there is one. (The older Wal-Marts were more frequently placed near downtown, but few of those remain as they have been rapidly replaced by the Supercenters, always placed several miles out of town along the highway. And then many smaller businesses wind up migrating farther from town along with the Wal-Mart.)

The non-crunchy response to all this, of course, is: That's the free market, baby! If that's what homeowners and businesses have freely chosen, it must be right; or if not, there's nothing you can or should try to do about it anyway. But is it really a good thing to have small towns dissolve out into the countryside like this? For neither businesses nor individuals to really inhabit "downtown" anymore? For big chunks of our lives to be spent in the rolling bubble of the automobile as we drive from home to work to school to store--all of these places being remarkably far from and isolated from each other now even in the smallest of towns, and carefully constructed to minimize non-commercial public space and the chance of random encounters.

Maybe small towns are not as frequently and deeply messed-up in other parts of the country as they are here. But it sure seems a problem here in Georgia and in the neighboring states I have driven a good bit through.

Charles in Michigan writes:

For many of us on the right you've started a long overdue discussion. Many thanks. One of the thefts of the 20th century was to deprive us of even the language with which we could state our beliefs. You were either a communist, a liberal, or a capitalist, all terms to be defined in terms of economic philosophy.

I feel as if I'm slowly awakening from a century long amnesia.

Anyway, to your question about Chartres vs a megachurch. By definition, a conservative conserves the past. Not as you would a dead object d'art or a decrepit antique, but as a kind of ancestral flame that must never be allowed to go out. The times sure aren't favorable to Chartres and its message, but that doesn't let us off the hook. We're still accountable for what happens on our watch.

To speak more broadly, I think all old things, man made or not, old churches, old buildings, old monuments, old homesteads, old places, old trees serve to remind us of who came before, what they thought, what they lived for, what they died for. They inspire public recollection and, if I can resurrect the word, local virtue.

(So do people, sometimes. For example, right there is happening a kind of economic cleansing of the Maine Coast. The increase in real estate values has pushed up the property taxes to ruinous levels. This means Mainers who have lived by and from the sea for generations are being forced to sell their homes and lands, and move elsewhere. As they disperse, a stern but noble culture of the sea will vanish forever. We lose role models but gain satiated yuppies. No doubt similar destructions of our moral resources are going on all over the America, always in the name of the free market)

Frederica:

Maybe you could give us some more thoughts connecting of how a beautiful built environment effects (1) specifically conservative values and (2) community?

On point one, James Howard Kunstler has written about how destructive our throwaway strip-mall architecture helps condition all of us to regard the built environment as disposable. We’ll use it up and then move on. Here’s the relevant passage from Crunchy Cons:

Kunstler is a ferocious critic of the man-made environment in contemporary America, which he believes “has ceased to be a credible human habitat.” He contended [in “The Geography of Nowhere”] that since about 1945, We’ve been building neighborhoods not to suit authentic human needs for beauty and community, but to move product as cheaply and quickly as possible. For reasons of expedience and efficiency, Kunstler argued, Americans cut themselves off from architectural tradition, a tradition rooted in the same ancient wisdom about pattern language and its effects on the human psyche that Jonathan Hale cites. We began to build houses and neighborhoods and cities that have no connection to the past or the future, and that ultimately are not worth caring about. Our built landscape, Kunstler has written, “ends up diminishing us spiritually, impoverishing us socially, and degrading the aggregate set of cultural patterns that we call civilization.”

“This is the price that we pay for ignoring our own psychology and millenniums of tradition that proceeded from it in the form of practical wisdom,” he wrote. “I daresay many Americans don’t care what their own houses or their neighbors’ houses look like. We check this off to good old American pragmatism, or patriotic individualism, but the consequences are rather serious: a world outside the confining walls of the home that nobody cares about, a country made up of places that are not worth caring about, and a nation that is not worth defending.”

That’s harsher than I would have put it, but his point is essentially sound. It is supremely ironic that the chief defenders of a status quo that violates tradition so radically are … conservatives.

Reading over the discussion today puts me in mind of Debora Shuger’s excellent book on the English Reformation--a time very formative of the kinds of divides we experience today--called Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance. In one passage in particular, Shuger quotes Paul Tillich’s statement that “the Middle Ages were dominated by one problem, namely, to have a society which is guided by a present reality of a transcendent divine character. … This was the problem of the Middle Ages--to have the holy present.” Shuger goes on to describe how the medieval church was attacked in the Reformation precisely at those points of most clear visible manifestations of holiness.

She then restates the matter:

Viewed one way, Protestantism represents a denial of the need for visible, institutional holiness. In opposition to Catholics like Sir Thomas More who stressed the visibility and continuity of the Roman church, Protestants tended to redefine the “holy, catholic, and apostolic church” of the Creed as the invisible church of the predestined. Thus the church could not be identified with any specific historical church: it was not an institution but “the whole multitude of the faithful.” The split between Spirit and structure appears most clearly in the Radicals, who, according to Luther, supposed they had “swallowed the Holy Spirit feathers and all,” and therefore denied the need of any official (that is, clerical) church.

What does this have to do with home? A lot I think. At its most fundamental points I think the traditional conservative project is best understood as an attempt to recover the ground of existence for a truly social realm that is neither of the state/market/collective nor of the individual and his limitless appetite. “Home” broadly construed as not just four walls and a roof but as the highways and byways that weave together the strands of memory, church, kin, work, and play into a place of belonging; home in this sense is seen and ought to be experienced as the central focal point of man’s contact with God; with the divine and holy ground of being.

As has been pointed out before, these discussions are nothing new. Anyone remember Brent Bozell?

More readers weigh in on property taxes and the effect they have on conserving community. Here’s Joel in California:

Certainly, much as Nancy pointed out property taxes can be very difficult for families to handle as time goes on, especially as people move into their retirement years. In many ways this has been the great benefit of California's Prop. 13. Which locks in property tax rates at 1% (+ some carried over bond issues) and fixes the assessed value of the home at the price paid for the property plus I believe a max 2% adjustment per year.

That being said, as valuable as Prop. 13 is, it is not without it's distorting affects. Because property taxes are largely fixed for long-time homeowners, homeowners who no longer work and have retired, are easily able to continue to afford the property taxes associated with living close to prime near commute locations. As a result, the supply of homes near major work areas are distortively low, which serves to make housing even more expensive. This is demonstrated by the fact of just how many people in California have disturbingly long commutes, of which I am one. Don't get me wrong Prop. 13 is immensely valuable, but it is not without costs. Not the least of which is that the next generation will be the hardest hit. This has especially been the case in California again, where new communities are commonly assessed something called Mello-Roos. Which is a type of bond assessed against only new communties for 30 years. As a result, newer (typically after about 1990ish) communities can be paying upwards of 2% of the assessed value of property. Again, there is no easy answer, "protecting" a community can have the same affect as undermining the "community"; the people may stay the same, but its attributes will change. It hasthe affect of causing the community to remain static and age together, but a community that was once perhaps young families, will down the road become a community of retirees.

Tell Nancy we share her pain with the insatiable tax hogs in Travis County. Our neighborhood, formerly considered blighted, is seeing older residents and working-class families saying to hell with the high taxes, selling out, and moving to the suburbs in other counties (my wife and I are thinking of doing the same thing). The ridiculous tax rates might be bearable if we actually got something for the money.

Rod, I think your initial post today considers two separate, but related things: the physical environment, and the kind of life that grows there. An oyster and a shell. You speak of:

a physical space that makes it easier to conserve the kinds of cultural virtues conservatives prize.

Nancy from Austin writes:

I don't know if your book touches on this but another factor affecting a person's view of their home is property taxes. When we bought our old, charming 1920s house in central Austin 16 years ago, we thought we would stay here for the rest of our lives. But, we live in a town where property values have soared and the local taxing entities are insatiable. Our property taxes have gone up @$1,000 every year for the last ten years and we are now selling- we simply can't afford the property taxes anymore (we had refinanced 13 years ago and gotten a 15 year mortgage- when our house is paid off in two years our property taxes will be more than our mortgage, insurance and property tax was 13 years ago). It's sad- this is where our children grew up and is the only home the youngest two have ever known, but we can't justify the expense.

Reader Jason writes:

The time I spent in Western Europe convinced me that Christianity there is on its last legs. Going to the churches just hammered the idea home, as most were museums and not functioning as churches. Standing in those great edifices did not bring me closer to God, as the body of His church no longer tread those stones. They had been transformed from monuments to God's glory to a pile of artfully arranged rocks.

On the other hand, I have also spent some time in the Dallas area's churches, some of them snidely ascribed the prefix, "mega." The superficial difference is one of architecture. The real difference is that the superficially gauche "mega" churches are living, working parts of Christ's Body.

If I have to choose a target for the terrorist to level, let the dead rocks fall and let Christ's living church remain intact, despite its lack of graceful medieval architecture. I'd rather a tourist attraction be destroyed than a functioning church.

It’s not supposed to be about the external trappings. This applies to family and self, as well as church.

But they are important. “Christ’s living church,” in Jason’s words--the actual human beings that constitute the church--would still survive the loss of their building. They could just build another megachurch. If the Chartres cathedral were lost, it would be an unmitigated cultural catastrophe, and not just for Christians. I do not agree that the Chartres cathedral is not still a monument to God’s glory. I first saw it in 1984, as a 17-year-old of no particularly strong religious faith. I was so overwhelmed by its beauty and grandeur that I felt a strong urge to know more about the religious imagination that caused such a spectacular edifice to be built. Beauty, then, got me on the road to conversion. I suspect I’m not alone. A similar point: is Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion” a truer expression of the divine character than “Shine Jesus Shine” or “On Eagle’s Wings”? Does the St. Matthew’s Passion have more to teach us about God than these other populist hymns?

Rod, when you say that “Americans now live in places that they find hard to love, and that make ordinary human community difficult,” I think that has a direct bearing on your question: “Do we all put personal goals ahead of the good of our particular place?”

It’s hard to put the good of a particular place ahead of personal goals if the place itself is hard to love. That’s asking people to act positively on the basis of abstract morality, through a pure act of will.

Consider this statement from the Prospect magazine article you cited:

The entrepreneurs of 19th-century Japan could have invested their money more safely on Wall Street than in Japan, but the thought hardly occurred to them. Their governing motive was … a national feeling that joined the Japanese of the day together as a group; each individual identified with this commitment and felt it personally.

That’s why I think it can be meaningless to ask, in the abstract, whether we should stay in our hometown. What if its population is transient, and there is no sense of community? What if it’s ugly, with no local culture to speak of? What if we have few friends or extended family there? To ask people to commit to such a place, in the name of an abstract ideal, will seem like empty moralism (except, of course, for those with a great love for the principle itself).

Yes, it’s true that a place develops community and culture--becomes loveable--when people commit to it. But in our transient society, where many of us pick a location because of convenience (job, schools, taxes), and where there are fewer and fewer places with a distinctive culture, to commit to the place you happen to live in can seem arbitrary--sort of like committing to an arranged marriage with someone you find unattractive and colorless. There has to be a genuine attraction first from which real bonds can take root.

For many people the first step towards retrieving a sense of rootedness will come from moving to a place where they’ll want to stay put. Absent that, the inclination to be in motion, searching for a place that feels like home, will seem the natural thing to do.

That still leaves the question: Is it realistic to think we can re-create our communities so that we’ll want to put loyalty to them before social mobility? I think that’s a legitimate question for conservatives to debate.

Chris in Austin writes:

Part of the reason the built environment is now in such sad shape in this country is because of the fundamental change in the way we use housing. Used to be that a house was intended to be a permanent structure and a part of a permanent community. That is no longer true. Housing has changed from being a durable good to a consumer good. Houses in the big developments are now built with a shelf-life, they aren’t intended to last longer than 20-25 years (and I would argue that the houses currently being built in Texas by the big publicly-traded builders will last only about 15 years). Instead of buying a house to live in, possibly for the rest of our lives and to pass on to our kids, we buy one to stay in for a few years, like a Motel 6, and then move on. No wonder there’s a lack of community.

"Where we were living before was a center for McMansions and teardowns. We were watching them being built, and my then-father-in-law, a retired chief engineer with NASA, would walk over there with me to look at them. He’d point out how the contractors were using substandard materials behind the walls, and expensive materials on the outside.”

A developer of some of these houses ended up as a legal client of Bill’s. “He was laughing about how people who bought $80,000 houses were pickier than the people who bought the McMansions. The people who bought the less-expensive houses were going to live there forever, and the McMansions people weren’t. A lot of them were planning to move out before there were problems.”

This disregard for craftsmanship and the ethic of disposability rubbed Bill the wrong way. “It seems to me the essence of being a conservative is appreciating what’s there, what you have. Conservatives seem to be not so willing to cast aside what they have just because something new and superficially more interesting has come along. They ought to have the same views about their homes and communities.”

Whenever the subject of neighborhoods and towns comes up I can't help but think of the description of housing as a "machine for living." That description brought with it housing tracts miles away from any place for people to gather, the loss even of the local sandlot, and an entire ideology of housing design that levelled poor people's neighborhoods (and middle class people's neighborhoods for that matter) to make way for apartment towers surrounded by nothing, simply plopped down in the middle of a field, barely walking distance even to the main street, let alone anywhere viable for work, shopping or play.

And, oh yes, the "machine for living" quotation is from the French leftist Le Corbusier, leader of "brutalist" architecture. Which raises my continuing question, why do so many people defend as "the American way"
trends and institutions foisted upon us by the left during the post-war era?

A return to towns that make sense, where work, play, schooling, shopping and sleeping are part of an integrated life, would be a return to the way Americans did things from the Puritans' landing up to the New Deal. I can't help but think that preserving the New Deal is not what conservatism is all about, and that conservatives who believe in the innovative powers of entrepreneurs ought to be able to escape from the massive, New Deal mindset that we have to split up our world into compartments that suit nobody but a few lazy developers and ideologues. After all, one thing we know from the market is that people want to live in viable towns--that's why property values in places like Old Town Alexandria (the old urbanism) and Seaside Florida (the "new" urbanism) are so much higher than surrounding areas.

Today we're talking about Home. This chapter is specifically about houses, but it speaks more broadly to questions of the built environment in which we live, and the role architecture, neighborhood design, and aesthetics play in helping to foster--or not--a physical space that makes it easier to conserve the kinds of cultural virtues conservatives prize.

From the Home chapter:

To understand why our modern residential landscape leaves so many of us with a vacant feeling, it's useful to see our houses and neighborhoods in the way I've come to think of as sacramental. What ideals do they convey in their physical reality? How do these habitats make those who live in them feel? What kind of life is possible here?
What does living in such places teach residents? Howe does it shape their character and outlook?

These aren't silly questions, or the kinds of things that only the well-off can afford to think about. Your typical conservative will scoff at them defensively, but he can only dismiss these questions if he is determined to ignore human nature, and the way the built environment both expresses humanity's deepest longings and aspirations, and the way it shapes them.

Thought experiment: You are standing at mass in the great Gothic cathedral at Chartres, beneath the vast symphonic complexity of the building's soaring arches; now you are at the same ceremony inside an equally vast modern American suburban megachurch, which looks like an expensively built gymnasium or theater. Theologically, the ceremony has precisely the same meaning. But in which place do you feel closer to God, more aware of the holiness of existence? From which of these churches are you more likely to emerge with a glow of exaltation? If a terrorist with a truck bomb forced you to choose which of these structures ou'd rather see destroyed, would it make a difference to you? Why?

Granted, this is an extreme example, but the same principle applies to our houses. The way they look, and the way we build them, matters. We have been trained to think that beauty is a luxury; consequently, most Americans now live in places that they find hard to love, and that make ordinary human community difficult.

March 12, 2006

Did you know that David Kirkpatrick hasn't been
covering the conservative beat for a year or so? I didn't, until I read
it in the Times's public editor column today. In fact, they don't have anybody on that beat at the moment. Has anyone noticed? Seriously?