The Agrarian's Lament: On Wendell Berry. An introspection.

The Agrarian's Lament: On Wendell Berry. An introspection.: We noted the passing of Wendell Berry here on September 1, but I didn't go into much introspection on him in relation to us.  This omiss...

On Wendell Berry. An introspection.

We noted the passing of Wendell Berry here on September 1, but I didn't go into much introspection on him in relation to us.  This omission was, ironically, time caused. 

I didn't have time to.

Since Berry's death I've ready comments by people, principally on Twitter, reflecting on how influential Berry was on them.  He was certainly influential on me, but not quite in the way that he was on others.  Berry wasn't the source of my world view.  Rather, what he was was the distiller of it.

I had an Agrarian mindset before I'd ever heard of Berry.  I came into Berry, in fact, because I had an agrarian mindset.  Indeed, I had an agrarian mindset before I had heard of agrarianism in a philosophical sense.  I was really a nascent agrarian by the time I graduated from high school, although only vaguely so.

By the time I had graduated from university as an undergrad, I was a full blown, if undefined, agrarian.  What I really wanted to do was to hunt, fish and garden, and be allowed to do so.  If I could have, I would have ranched.  I didn't have the means to do that, or to make my other goals my present habitus or mode of living, at least in full, although at the time wildgame provided most of my meat, and my father's garden most of my produce.  What I didn't have, was a good and steady income and the destruction of the extractive economy, which I was disenchanted with anyhow, kept me from having one.   I had already found a literary fellow traveller in the form of Aldo Leopold.

Law school seemed my only option, and so I went.

The Agrarian impulse however only strengthened during that time.  Getting out of law school in 1990 I recall telling a friend of mine that I had no ambition, as all I wanted to do was ranch.  He told me that didn't mean I had no ambition, that was my ambition.  Well, that's one of those insights that is a bit shocking when you first hear it, but it was correct.  At that time I still carried a sort of weltanschauung that required me to make something of myself in the eyes of the world, something that had been instilled by my mother.

In spite of starting practicing law, my agrarian world outlook only increased.  At that time I discovered the Southern Agrarians somehow, which was mind blowing.  For the first time, really, I learned that there others who held the same viewpoints on many things that I did. The Southern Agrarians, who are very problematic on some things, nonetheless really helped define my philosophical worldview to me and I realized that what I was, was an agrarian.

The Southern Agrarians were almost all dead by that point in time.  Only Andrew Nelson Lytle was left alive.  So the movement seemed to be dead itself, but the arrival of the Internet allowed even a very isolated person such as myself to learn who else was out there.  That lead me to Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry.  Berry was by far the more influential.

Indeed, Berry took the world out look I had and really distilled it. There were a lot of things I believed but I didn't have the existential nature of defined. Berry did that for me.  His influence on how I sese the world was massive.

Distilling my world view didn't stop with Berry.  Sometime after discovering him I discovered the Distributist, including Chesterton, and that really completed it, basically.  I often say, when there's ears to hear it, that while not all Distributists are Agrarians, all Agrarians are Distributist.

Berry stands in my intellectual formation with Leopold and Chesterton, three men who now are at some lively gathering beyond the veil.

Berry's death is a major and tragic loss for the intellectual life of the nation.  Not just agrarianism, but the soul of the United States itself.  Berry lived life the way it really should be lead.  He was deeply Christian (he was a Baptist) and a man of letters who farmed.  He saw America for what it was, what it had become, and what it should return to.  He advocated for Christian principles and lived a Christian life, while having a deep land ethic and understanding of the land itself.  He urged us to "become native to this place".

I've never really been able to pull off what he lived and advocated.  But I may be about to.

Berry, in his youth, was an opponent of the Vietnam War in a region that was likely not opposed to it.  His departure comes during the reign of Donald Trump.

Berry, like all true agrarians in contemporary society, likely knew that what he stood for was not going to be adopted by the culture at large.  The Southern Agrarians were already lamenting the destruction of the last of agrarianism during the 1930s.  The Unsettling of America, a masterpiece, was published in 1977. Particularly after the election of Ronald Reagan, each passing year has made the plight of agrarians worse in this country, as its yielded to an unprincipled culture and greed. Restraints placed on the evolution by the law, which do exist, and by the culture, which also exist but which are greatly weakened, have nearly fallen by the wayside.

Berry was 93 when he died this past week.  Donald Trump, suffering from dementia in the Oval Office while nearly ruling as a dictator, is 80 years old.  Berry was of the Silent Generation (Leopold was of the Lost Generation). Trump is a Baby Boomer and virtually defines that generation, in spite of what many in it would like to believe.

Berry stood for, and will continue to stand for, the opposite that everything Donald Trump does.  He was a sincere Christian deeply in nature and the virtues of self control on al things. Trump is, at best, a faux Christian who stands for destruction and avarice. They represent the two poles that struggle for the soul of the nation, one who would anchor us in a quiet and unassuming harbor, and another who would drag us out into and down under in the tempest.

Wendell Berry, August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026.  May the perpetual light shine upon him.

Foothill Agrarian: What would Danny Branch do?

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The Rural Blog: Wendell Berry, champion of natural places and agra...

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The Agrarian's Lament: In Memoriam: Wendell Berry.

The Agrarian's Lament: In Memoriam: Wendell Berry.: By Guy Mendes - Guy Mendes, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57041629 The great agrarian philosopher Wendell Be...

In Memoriam: Wendell Berry.

By Guy Mendes - Guy Mendes, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57041629

The great agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry has died at age 92.

A giant in the agrarian community, and a great intellect, he was an English professor, a novelist, social critic, environmentalist and dedicated Christian pacifist.

Probably more than any other figure, he defined the post World War Two agrarians in the United States.

Carpetbaggers and Becoming Native To This Place.

 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Now Other People Are “Pissed” At The “We The People Are Pissed” Billboard On I-80 in Wyoming

Probably the most revealing thing in the article:

The Kahlers moved to Wyoming from Colorado about three years ago. Jeanette Kahler said they moved to Wyoming for the state’s “conservative values.”

In other words, they're carpetbaggers.

Wyoming has always had a very high transient population.  Right from the onset, a lot of the people we associate with the state, actually weren't from here, and more significantly weren't from the region.  Francis E. Warren, for example, the famous early Senator, wasn't.  Joseph M. Carey wasn't.  A person might note that they arrived sufficiently early that they hardly could have been, but this carries on to this very day.  Sen. John Barrasso is a Pennsylvanian.  Secretary of State Chuck Gray is a Californian.

This does matter, as you can't really ever be a native of the Northern Plains or the Plains if you weren't born and raised here.  You might be able to convince yourself, and buy a big hat like Foster Freiss, but you aren't from here and more importantly aren't of here.  If you came from Montana, or Nebraska, or rural Colorado, that's different.  Or if you came in your early years, before you were out of school.  

But earlier arrivals did try.  They appreciated what they found, took the effort to grasp what it was, and sought to become native to this place.

The recent arrivals don't.  They brought their homes and their attitudes with them.

They were fooling themselves that they were "Wyoming" anything.

Or were.

Recently, however, something else has been going on.  Just as the Plains were invaded by European Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Wyoming is enduring it again with an invasion of Southerners, Rust Belt denizens, and Californians, who image they have Wyoming's values while destroying them.  One prominent Freedom Caucuser is really an Illinoisan with values so different from the native ones it's amazing she was elected, but then her district elected Chuck Gray as well, whose only connection with Wyoming is thin.  They do represent, however, the values of recent immigrants.

Whether you like it or not, Wyomingites have not traditionally been hostile to the Federal Government, and we knew we depended upon it.  Indeed, while one Wyoming politician may emphasize a narrative of being a fourth generation Wyomingite, and is, whose agricultural family pulled themselves up from the mule ears on their cowboy boots, and they did work hard, we can't get around the fact that the state was founded by the Federal Government which sent the Army in to kill or corral the original inhabitants and then gave a lot of the land away on a government assistance program.  

Wyoming was formed, in part, by welfare.

The government helped bring in the railroads, helped support agriculture, built the roads, kept soldiers and later airmen and their paychecks at various places, funded the airports, and helped make leasing oil rights cheap so that they could be exploited.

No real Wyomingite hates the government, no matter how much they may pretend they do.

Populist do, as they're ignorant.

Wyoming's cultural ethos was, traditionally, "I don't care what the @#$#$ you do, as long as you leave me alone".  The fables about Matthew Shepherd aside, people didn't really care much about what you did behind closed doors, but expected that you wouldn't try to force acceptance of it at a societal level.  Wyoming was, and remains, for good or ill the least religious state in the United States.  You could always find some devout members of various Protestant faiths, and devout and observant Catholics and Mormons have always been here. But the rise of the Protestant Evangelical churches is wholly new, and come in with Southerners.  When I was growing up, a good friend of mine was a Baptist, the only one I knew, as the church was close to his house (now he's a Lutheran).  I knew one of my friends was Lutheran, and there were some Mormon kids in school.  There was one Jehovah's Witness.  In junior high, one of my friends was sort of kind of Episcopalian, and I knew the son of the Orthodox Priest.  By high school I knew the daughter of the Methodist minister.  But outside of Mormon kids and Catholic kids, the religion of my colleagues was often a mystery.

I'm not saying the unchurched nature of the state was a good thing, but I am saying that by and large there was a dedicated effort to educate children and tolerance was a widely held value.  It was a tolerance, as noted, that required people to keep their deviations from a societal norm to themselves.  People who cheated on spouses, who were homosexuals, or any other number of things could carry on doing it, but not if they were going to demand you accepted it.

And frankly, that was a better way to approach things.

Now, that's being fought over.

The Freedom Caucus group might as well have Sweet Home Alabama as their theme song, and that's not a good thing.

Serving civilization.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Wendell Berry

The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian of the Week, Wendell Berry

The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian of the Week, Wendell Berry: 

Agrarian of the Week, Wendell Berry

Surely known to everyone who might stop by this blog, polymath intellectual Wendell Erdman Berry of Kentucky is a farmer, a novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, and profound cultural critic.  His writings have had an enormous impact on a variety of areas, not the least of which being American agrarianism.

Last edition:

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week, and Agrarian of the Week, Tom Bell.

The idea of a vocation.

The idea of vocation attaches to work a cluster of other ideas, including devotion, skill, pride, pleasure, the good stewardship of means and materials. Here we have returned to intangibles of economic value. When they are subtracted, what remains is ‘a job,’ always implying that work is something good only to escape.

Wendell Berry.

Knowing where you are.

If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.

Wendell Berry

Communications, Church, and COVID-10

When the Pandemic first started, I published this item on one of our companion blogs*:

Churches of the West: The Church and Pandemic.: St. Mary's Cathedral, Diocese of Cheyenne Wyoming. When this particular blog was started back in 2011 its stated purposes was...

I understand our Diocese's orders, to a degree, during the pandemic.  The Diocese had to close the door to public Masses.  It had no other humane choice.  Catholics are obligated to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days and our community, where Catholics are a minority, has a grand total of at least ten Catholic Masses per weekend. That's a lot.  A lot of those Masses are heavily attended.

Added to this, during normal period on the liturgical calendar there are still things going on in the Church or Parish as rule.  Confessions are held weekly more frequently than that.  There are meetings. And there are Baptisms and Marriages.  So a lot is going on in a Church.

During Lent, even more is going on.

So those voices that proclaim that nothing should have been done to disrupt normal Parish life are flat out wrong. 

Which doesn't mean that the critics don't have a point.

Those critics, of course, have to be understood in the context of the Catholic (the word means "Universal") Church being global, but the churches being local.  That is, the local Bishop of a Diocese impacts the daily lives of average Catholics a lot more than the Pope does.

And that's where, at least to some degree, legitimate criticism can be levied.

The response to the pandemic has varied from diocese to diocese around the globe and from diocese to diocese around the country.  And it is not uniform in any sense, nor would we expect it to be.  So any criticism about the Bishops doing this or that are incorrect from the onset.  A person probably only really grasp what the Bishop of their Diocese is doing, although quite a few of them have done very similar things.  Our Diocese took one of the most extreme, if a person cares to define it that way, approaches.

All the sacraments were cancelled save for Confessions where there was a risk of death.

I'll be frank that I feel the order went way too far from the onset.  In a discussion with a very Catholic friend, he posed the question of "well, what if priests had become ill and died?", which is a highly legitimate point.   And I'm not arguing that we should have ignored the state's order and simply charged on as if nothing was happening.  But shutting down all the sacraments was simply too much.  As I pointed out to my friend, what about those who were to be married and simply shrugged their shoulders in our era of weak fealty and started keeping house, something we observant Catholics regard as a mortal sin?  And what about people who would have gone to Confession and simply took Pope Francis' suggestion of "perfect contrition" lightly, and figured they were good to go. Some likely have passed and some who don't study such things will simply assume that perhaps that counts from here on out and they don't have to observe the Church's laws in regard to at least an annual Confession?  And what about those who have simply accommodated themselves to televised Mass or no Mass at all, violation of the Church's canons though they are in normal times.  Everyone has met people who have allowed their consciences to become elastic to accommodate their personal desires or laziness. 

Indeed, the Church, as opposed to Protestant Churches, has at least in part kept a set of canons requiring participation for that reason.  Catholics regard it as a mortal sin not to go to Mass, if they can, on Holy Days and Sundays not because it's in the Bible, but because its a law imposed by the Church.  Indeed, Protestants rarely grasp that Catholics don't regard Protestant failing to observe Catholic Canons as committing serious sins, which is not to say that there aren't serious sins everyone is to avoid.  I.e, Protestants aren't expected to observe Catholic Holy Days for instance.

None of which, again, is to suggest that the Church should have ignored the virus and kept the public Masses.

But it is to say that the cancellation of everything else, where it occurred, and it occurred here, was a mistake.  Baptisms could clearly have been handled with low risk and there was never any sort of state order requiring them to be cancelled.  Marriages could have been too if the couples were willing to go forward with hardly anyone in attendance.  That anyone would consider that in this era would surprise many but I personally know a young couple who were married of their own volition in just such a way, and I myself recall stepping into the Church years ago on a Wednesday night when there was a marriage going on, elaborate white dress and all, with less than ten people in attendance.

Likewise, people being brought into the Church as adults could have been.

Confessions under some circumstances should have been allowed.  Yes, I don't want a line to the Confessional on Saturdays going on right now but cancelling all private Confession in a time of crises was not the right thing to do in my view.  There were ways to accommodate that.

And failing to grasp communications in this modern era is, in my view, an enormous failure.

A friend of mine who is a devout Catholic in Oklahoma tells me that in his archdiocese they are getting weekly emails from that archdiocese.

We aren't.

Now, to a degree, that doesn't surprise me.  Catholic parishes are large and no doubt the diocese doesn't have hardly any of our email addresses.  But it goes beyond that.

Our Bishops original orders expired on Thursday, April 30.  That should mean that a continuation of them in some form should have been widely distributed prior to that.

Nothing was.

What happened instead was a press release.

Now, most people don't get press releases and the Diocese doesn't even publish its own press releases, for the most part, on its website.  Checking it this morning what remains as the case is that there's a press release from back in January regarding the Diocese's actions in regard to a Bishop who served long, long ago.  While that story is real news and while the Diocese took the proper and strong action regarding it, most Wyoming Catholic probably didn't live in the state back then or weren't alive back then.  It's the sort of attention headline grabbing story that deserves to be an attention grabbing headline story, and which if the Press applied its  focus more broadly, would show up a lot more in regard to other institution, particularly schools.

But as far as the lives of average Catholics go, Mass closures matter a lot more.

And we're learning the status of that on the second page of the Tribune, with a headline reading, if you just read on line:

Cheyenne diocese says it will continue to suspend Mass through mid-May

Or, if you read the e-edition or print edition:

Mass Closures To Continue

Now, in fairness, the proactive Priests of the diocese will contact those that they can, or answer questions from those who pose them, and post an announcement to their online bulletins, or make a Youtube or Facebook announcement.  So it'll get out that way.

But is that good enough?

I'm submit it isn't. 

Indeed, delivering a press announcement in 2020 in a state where we're a large minority means that most people are left without anything unless they're proactive.  Most people don't read the newspapers anymore.  And an announcement delivered so late that it comes out the day of the vigil of Sunday is not going to get to most people.

In an earlier time, when a lot of Catholics lived in the Catholic Ghetto in the United States, or in Catholic communities, or where most Catholics in communities like ours where Catholics are a minority, had a means by which such news traveled pretty quickly, and often by the parish priest.  Parish priests weren't moved much, if at all, and they knew their parishioners.  Indeed, even here, it would have been the case that a lot of priests would have been in a community for decades, would have eaten frequently at parishioners homes, would have gone to their high school sporting events, and would have stopped by the Knights of Columbus, where a lot of the men would have been members, nightly to make sure that things were in control at the bar and people were heading home.

Some of that still occurs, but I frankly think it's a lot less than it used to be.  There are indeed still small parishes, or even large ones, where parishioners are really tight with a priest, but as Americans have lost connection with their own communities, which they have, that tight bond isn't there to the same degree, in my view.  Indeed, I don't think that tight bond is there with anything, which is why a writer like Wendell Berry would write a book called Becoming Native To This Place.  It's one of the huge holes in modern American life.

So, circling back, how does an oilfield worker from Texas get the news?  What about a junior accountant who moved up from Colorado?  You get the point.

Indeed, at this time a lot of Catholic parishioners are in the category of "vagabondi", moving from parish to parish as convenient, which is acceptable in the Church.  They donate where they go, but they aren't really listed anywhere, and they probably aren't being contacted.  Indeed, as far as I can tell, written communication around here has been pretty limited during the closure.

An assumption that on a Saturday morning most people are going to read the news in a newspaper and then call anyone they know who doesn't get it is flat out wrong, if such an assumption was made.  Simply waiting until Friday to say anything at all is likewise not a very good way to communicate anything to a group of people who are morally bound to attend Mass if they can.  It makes no sense at all.

The same news also informs the readers, most of whom will  not be Catholic, that Confessions by appointment are now resumed, which is a good thing, and that Masses after the 15th will be resumed but the present restrictions on public gathering, which actually will expire on that date, will also be observed.  I'm not sure what that means, but the size of gatherings is now very limited so, if that holds, and means what it says, logic would presume that the requirement to attend Mass will remain suspended as there's no earthly way to do that for all the Catholics in most parishes, even if Masses were run all day long on Sunday, which they can't be as Canon Law restricts the number of Masses a Priest can say in a day.  Perhaps that latter restriction makes sense, but we're still being informed of this in a very poor way.

As noted, every Diocese is different and this isn't applicable everywhere.  But rising to his crisis does not appear to have been done very well in Cheyenne.

If this seems to be asking for too much,and I'd strenuously argue it isn't, other institutions haven't been similarly lacking. The courts, for example, have been excellent in sending out information.  And the Diocese, in this modern era, does have a website where an announcement could have been placed front and center.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*I debated posting this comment at all as I'm not disloyal, and I also wasn't sure if I should post it first here, or on that blog.  Ultimately I decided to post it, and here, as it is a local item for one thing, and a communications matter, at least in part, secondly.

Eating is an agricultural act.

Eating is an agricultural act.

Wendell Berry

3 Acres?

That's the size of the farmed. . . or gardened, plot of land here:

WORK TRADE FOR ACCOMMODATION: VALLICAN, BC AT WHERE THE PAVEMENT USED TO END FARM

One of the links on our eclectic set on the right hand side of this blog, under agriculture, is the site of a Canadian agrarian organization.

Now, for those not into this stuff, in the agricultural world there's a wide spectrum on farming and, beyond that, what it means to be a "farmer".  If you are deep into production agriculture, you can find those who are aggressively "get big or get out".  You'll also find a lot of traditional farmer, by which we mean commercial farmers who are operating solo or family farm operations of scale.  Then there's the part time farmers that do that, and also do in town jobs (very common).  

And then there's the hobby farmers, who really do something else full time but who live just outside of town on Rustic Acres, or what have you, and who do a little farming on the side, which describes all sorts of activity from having a big garden to near substance farming.

And then you have the radical agrarians.

Agrarianism itself can be described in all sorts of ways. Agrarianism, by its very nature, has a strong subsistence element to it, as with pure agrarians, subsistence is the goal. 

American, and Canadian, farming had its roots in agrarianism from the very onset, something that people basically know in a way and which influences, to this day, the way that people look upon farming.  The "forty acres and a mule" type of view of farming, in which a family sets out to support itself on the land, is an agrarian view of farming, and frankly it was always been starkly at odds with the type of farming that had come up in the English speaking world (but not in all of Europe) in the Medieval period, post 1066.  The sort of farming that subjects of the English crown left when they departed to North America was a sort of production tenant farming, where farming labor was expended for the landlord.  In the Colonies, it was expended for yourself.  We'll expand on that at some later point, but we'll note here that what we're stating about the American Colonies was also true, but in distinctly different ways, for the French one in North America as well, that being New France.  I.e., Quebec.

Chesterton famously saw Distributism, that agrarian doctrine he advocated, resulting in Three Acres and A Cow for the English (and frankly English Catholic) farmers.

But that three acres?

That's what the unit above references.

And here's the question.  Could a modern market garden, in the right North American market, really be viable on three acres?

Pretty tough.

We've addressed this before, and not really in the kindest fashion, in this old thread:

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

But we raise it again here, more gently.

Three acres.

Recipe for small scale success, or a quick trip out of agriculture?

Part of that probably depends, I'd guess on how broad your individual duties may be.  I'd note that as the "young Agrarians" often depicted in happy tones on those sites depicting them are not only young, but they're single.  Indeed, a young woman that a relative introduced me to, via the net, in order that she might garner agricultural advice (with it being questionable at best what the quality and value of that advice might be), to give her help in her agrarian goals was obviously in a permanently sterile relationship with her rather despondent long time male "friend", whom I otherwise met and who rather obviously was despairing of a relationship which he was taking more seriously and not happy with the idea of having a permanent playmate.  To put it more bluntly, they were having sex rather obviously, but she was medicating with the goal of avoiding the byproduct of that, which is ironically starkly anti agrarian.

That is, agrarianism, if you look at realistically, didn't have the goal of supporting a class of Norwegian Bachelor Farmers. . . or sterile Friends With Benefits. . . but families.

And modern Agrarianism doesn't seem to be doing that well.

There certainly are families that attempt it, and some of them have goals that square with agrarian philosophers of earlier times (most agrarians themselves have never been philosophers), and of today as well, such as Wendell Berry.  Indeed, some of those individuals stand in stark contrast with other modern agrarians in viewing their enterprise just that way.  

But they certainly find it tough.

One such individual Jason Craig, who is a Catholic farmer, writer, and who lives on a small farm in North Carolina.  Another one is Kevin Ford, who is a stated Catholic agrarian and blogger who has had a series of blogs, the most recently one being Good Ground, but which has one single entry.

One who formally attempted this was Devon Rose, who admits that he went into the enterprise with low knowledge and failed.  He humorously turned his experiment into a book entitled Farm Flop:  A City Dweller's Guild to Failing on a Farm in Two Years Or Less.  Less humorous was the treatment explored in Salon, which we featured quite some time ago in this entry here, which we already noted above:

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

 

In the "you must be deaf category" is the author of this story that appears on Salon and which has been commented upon by Forbes:

What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable 

You'll have to hit the link to follow that one.

That entry, I'll admit, wasn't charitable about the topic, even though I'm sympathetic with the overall goals.  But I'm sympathetic in a Wendell Berry sort of way, not in a neo hippy wort of way.  And that takes me back to the original entry here.

Three acres isn't very much ground. . .anywhere.

Or is it?

Maybe I'm prejudiced by my own location and point of view, but three acres wouldn't be enough to make a living on here unless, maybe, somebody was farming an illegal crop.  And I really doubt that three acres will support a family anywhere.  Indeed, the stated American dream was always 40 acres and a mule, but I'll see these tiny plots suggested from time to time and really wonder.

Despair and meaningless work

The Patrick Coffin Show recently had an episode on despair.

Ours is an age of social disruption, isolation, and atomization. Rates of suicide among young people, rich and poor, along with instances of clinical depression are on the sharp rise since 1999. A dark ennui—call it despair, or melancholia, or depression—has settled into the lives of millions of people.

Ennui indeed, depression is a First World epidemic.  It's rare, along with all its attendant results, in the Third World.  Yes, the very people that people in the First World think live in a state of dark deperation, don't.  That's the developed world. For all its problems, people in the more primitive less developed parts of the globe are a lot happier than we generally are.  There's something going on.

If they have less in the way of material resources and less wealth, they have more of a lot of other things. They're more religious. They're more family oriented.  They live closer to nature even if not  all farmers or pastorialist by any means.  They've kept a lot. . . so far, that we have lost.  And they have a lot less of some things we have in abundance.  They have less angst. They have less depression. They have less gender confusion. They seem to know who they are and what they are about.

We don't.

And I wonder if one of the things we don't have is work that matters.

We have plenty of work that's about money.  And the "best" jobs in our society are all about money, and little else. There are plenty of people whose jobs entail dealing solely with making money and nothing else, to include some jobs that are ostensibly about something else but which in reality, for quite a few occupying them, have become all about money.  Some people have jobs that are only about money.  And there's lots of jobs that aren't all about money, but rather are about. . . about. . . . well. . . . 

Now, work has always been with us and unless a person is a hopeless romantic there's no earthly way to pretend that all work has always been worthwhile to the worker, other than perhaps in some basic sense that its work and work serves a purpose in and of itself. So, you might ask, how can I state that?

Well, I am stating that, and I think perhaps this observation is true.

This observation comes about in part, I'd note, due to some work last Sunday. But in my other occupation.

Worthwhile work.

We were branding.

I love working cattle and I love the hard work part of it as well as the parts that aren't hard work.  It's hard to be blue when doing it.  Indeed, it's hard to focus on anything else.

And at the end of the day, you know what it was that you did.

And this is not true in a tangible sense for almost everyone working a modern job.

Only, or at least mostly, jobs that have a very direct, and I'd argue physical aspect, to them retain this feature.  Being a cabinet maker does, and probably being a surgeon does. But people working in offices doing reports don't get it.

And because my next day was a day in the office, that was abundantly clear to me.

I rarely talk about my own office work directly for a lot of reasons.  Indeed, I really can't.  But I'll make a slight exception here.

I recently was working on a case that was venued in Colorado, and more specifically in one of the endless outliers of the Great Blight.  The opposing counsel was consistently aggressively difficult to get along with even as it seemed that our facts were vastly out pacing their concept of the case.  Finally, a setting of a certain type was held.  I went and met opposing counsel whom I had only seen previously via their website head shots.

And there they were.  An aging lawyer who was artificially thin, the way that people are who run off their weight in a desperate manner until they look unhealthy.  And a somewhat younger lawyer who engages in some similar activity who had the facial complexion of wallpaper paste. And the latter continually had a sort of titch or grimace associated with people who are painfully ill at ease and nervous.   It was revealing. 

And the contrast is remarkable.  On Sunday I dealt with young and old but a lot of now middle aged.  Tan and healthy and all pretty happy and comfortable.  A lot of people that I deal with in the refrigerated antiseptic offices in big cities aren't that way. . .unless they're the staff. The staff, which more concrete goals, often seem to be pretty happy.

And that might have to do with the lie that all work is meaningful.

It's all meaningful in some fashion.  But at least on my day to day job, the fib that law school professors relate to the law is pretty clear.  Perhaps its about "helping people" like its so often claimed, but that's far from apparent but it's really not generally the case that we ride in on unicorns and hurl out bunnies to the emotionally needy.  I could go on, but I'll not.  It's not that the work of this type, or work as an accountant, or a computer programmer, etc, isn't needed. Rather, its need is highly intangible and in some cases its needed because we've created a system of need requiring it.

I suspect that the nature of a lot of modern work creates a lot of despair.  We're separated from nature, which we don't like, and ever more concentrated in big glass and steel heating and cooling units, which we don't like, and on a treadmill where we never see the completed cabinets, the built wall or the branded cattle.  We're doing something, and indeed there must be a need for it or we wouldn't be paid to do it, but you can't really see your results in physical terms and in some cases the results in some kinds of work exist because we've created a system requiring that type of work.

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There's not a lot of consolation for reaching any one goal of an obvious nature.

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Not that this observation is brand new.

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Well what of it? Are we all to become Leo Tolstoy and abandon the larger world for the peasant commune?

No, probably not.  

And indeed, most people can't afford to and quite a few who try some less weird version of this than Tolstoy did fail at it.  

Which doesn't mean there isn't something to a Wendell Berry view of the world.

And that certainly isn't the prevailing view.  The entire society has been pushed towards working at InnerTrobe.

Of course, I may be too harsh.  Maybe people love the glass and steel refrigerated antiseptic worlds where they work on topics they've never never dealt with in the field, impacting lives of people much different than their own.

But the statistics don't seem to support it.

The question would be, how to restore meaning to work?  That wouldn't be easy for much of our economy at this point, but it would seem that the level of despair associated with it would warrant it.

Making it less about money and more about value would be a good starting place.

Ambition and Ambition

I've been doing a little reading recently about  the founding personalities of this state.  And I'm not too sure I like them.  And, given as I know why I'm not too sure, I'm not too sure what this says about me.

The early history of this state's politics is heavily, almost exclusively, marked by men of high personal ambition. But that's what bothers me, their ambition was so personal.  None of them were from here, but then we couldn't expect them to be either, given as the native population was either truly Native, and therefore not recognized as US Citizenry at the time, as well as being an oppressed class, or otherwise very small in numbers.  That we would have to take as a given.

But the founding fathers, if you will, of the state, or at least those who obtained high political office, seem to be marked by a singular story.  They were from back east, they were often lawyers, they saw Wyoming as a wide open place where a person, often a lawyer, could make it big really quickly, as there were so few people and so many opportunities, and they translated this into political power.  Sometimes they stuck around thereafter, but often they did not.

I may be misreading them, but to those people this state was nothing more than a vehicle to personal success.  The state probably meant nothing more to them than any other place, and their own personal "success" was the goal.  They were highly personally ambitious.

But what about that sort of ambition?  It certainly doesn't comport with what Wendell Berry calls "becoming native to this place", and it isn't the sort of ambition that I have, or most long term residents of this state have.  People who have stuck it out here in lean times (and aren't all that happy to see people moving in, in spite of the pathetic babblings of the Casper newspaper calling 70,000 new residents something to be thankful for. . .hardly).  People who are really from here, love the land as a rule, and while we don't all agree with what means, we can all agree we love the state.

I suppose this might mean that my personal ambition is pretty skewed, or at least not very American.  I really don't get the thinking of people who move all over to follow a career.  And that seems destructive to me on top of it.  Never living anywhere, really, they never value anything other than themselves.