Kids (and their Parents) These Days

I got some real satisfaction out of Michael Chabon's essay on "The Wilderness of Childhood" in the New York Review of Books. Tim Burke brought the essay to my attention, and as he says, Chabon's basic claims are spot-on. Growing up for Chabon was a constant encounter with mystery and adventure, both of which took place in spaces that were unsupervised, unregulated, unscheduled: the woods beyond his house in Maryland, vacant lots and playgrounds, a whole cartography derived from "the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children": that's where the mean dogs are, that's where the kid with the air rifle lives, that's where the grandma who always has Popsicles in her garage freezer is to be found. In the context of all that, you explore. Being a writer, Chabon connects this to our literary imagination, but he fears the connection has been lost, replaced in the experience of our children with a safety-obsessed, "all-encompassing escort service." "We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another's houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between." He wonders, rightly, what will happen to the kind of stories today's kids will learn to tell themselves and others, when their parents--and Chabon implicates himself here--won't let them go out to play.

Tim's reflections on Chabon's piece strike a chord with me, a chord that I've written about a few times in the past. All by myself, I walked and rode my bike and rode the bus to school, to the bowling alley, to the grocery store, to the video game arcade, to the park, to the swimming pool, downtown to the comic book shop, or just out into the open country (the home I mostly grew up in was right on the edge of the suburban development of Spokane Valley; south of us were homes and construction sites, places for bike riding in the summer and sledding in the winter, while north of us were just open fields and country roads surrounded by drainage ponds and stands of pine trees, all there for the climbing and getting lost in). Like Tim--another member of "Generation X" like myself, a man whose childhood was shaped by the 1970s--I would be gone for hours some days, and my parents trusted that I could find my way to where I was going and back again. (And if I couldn't, there was the quarter I carried for calling from a pay phone.) Tim agrees that Chabon's diagnoses--a fixation on consumer safety, paranoia about lawsuits and child-snatching--but he also thinks Chabon is a little too mournful for the past. He writes, "[Chabon’s] missing something new about contemporary middle-class childhood. Sometimes, yes, it’s about ferrying the kids between contained, safe experiences. But also, I think that a lot of middle-class family life is now about the simultaneous adventures of children and adults, that children and adults are sharing far more of their experiences." He goes from there to make a defense of parents and children not having their own separate worlds, but sharing adventures together, and of the particular kind of media and story-telling that allows for a cross-over between adults and children.

I want to be more persuaded by Tim's response to Chabon than I am. My wife and I are very different sort of parents than our folks were (or, at least, than my folks were; Melissa's parents, interestingly, were much more into their children's lives and activities than mine). We interact with them, watch movies with them, involve ourselves with their learning and playtime a great deal; and our habits in the way we treat each other around our children and the way we treat our children themselves, don't seem to be terribly unique amongst our generation cohort of parents, but rather kind of typical. (I'm thinking in particular here of this fine old essay by Damon Linker, "Fatherhood, 2002".) Granted, there is a great deal of self-selection involved here--for reasons having to do with everything from political tastes to the amount of available free time to where we chose to buy our home, most of the parents we end up associating with have a socio-economic background at least vaguely similar to ours; we simply aren't close friends with any either dual-career couples with their kids in daycare and both of them working 80 hours a week as investment managers for high-powered banks. Still, I don't think I'm wrong to believe that our habits are not uncommon, especially amongst middle-class members of the American bourgeosie like ourselves. So I should feel comforted with Tim's suggestion that such behavior on our part is opening up new vistas for our children, rather than seeing it all as just an act of compensation, right?

Unfortunately, I don't think so. There are too many other factors which Tim either ignores or chooses not to address in concluding that Chabon, in his mourning for his own unpatrolled childhood experiences, may have been missing the point. Probably the primary one is contained in the passage of Chabon's essay which Melissa focused on as the real killer: after teaching his younger daughter how to ride a bike, and taking her on an evening ride around their neighborhood, during which they don't see a single other child, he plaintively asks, even if he does send his children out to play, "will there be anyone to play with?"

Imagination--even the imagination of a child on his or her own, navigating their fragmentary, mental map of secure locations and danger zones and unmarked paths in their own heads--is a collective effort; that "lore" Chabon mentions came from and through someone, many someones. Brothers and sisters, cousins and schoolmates, friends and enemies. In the midst of the wealth and changing mores of post-WWII America, with its suburbs and mobility and slowly but surely (especially by the late 1970s and through the 80s) strangled efforts to contain and preserve patterns of assocition and stability in the midst of an economy that spread out wealth ever more arbitrarily (think white flight and globalization here), moving around and actualizing yourself and seeking better meritocratic opportunities and taking care of number one all contributed to the shrinking of family size, the concentration of resources and attention, a thousand little changes (the relative disappearance of front porches and sidewalks, the growth industry in micromanaged and carefully constructed--and therefore expensive--play areas like Chuck E. Cheese and more) that made it hard and seemingly unwise to let kids go at it alone.

At some moment--or at a hundred distinct moments--along this continuum, you hit a tipping point: so many families consist of dual earners with no one at home during the day, and so many kids live far away from grandparents or other trusted figures, that you just have to hire someone to watch them (if you're rich) or put them in daycare (which is another growth industry all its own). And if you do that, you might as well get them into the best situations possible: not just any kind of substitute authority to keep an eye on them during the day, but organizations and teachers that will give them sports and preparatory school work and musical lessons and youth leagues and awards for participation and more. All of which is, of course, depending your situation, eminently defensible. And I'm not even touching on the real, often difficult, issues and requirements posed by children with special needs, or with idiosyncratic talents, or just whose home life is anything other the classic two-parents-in-the-home model. But generally, by and large, all of these "helps," all of these ways we assist in our childrens' navigation of their worlds, whether natural or suburban or urban, just build. And then, once you see all the other kids getting ready for school in the middle of summer, you need to do it for your kids; once you see that there's no one at the park except the homeless and the meth addicts, you refuse to let them head out on their own. In which case, they get bored, and you have to find more projects of them inside the walls of the home, or you need to chauffeur them to even more places. Etc., etc., etc., wash, rinse, repeat.

The possibilities of parents and children together--learning together, exploring together, telling stories together--are admirable to be sure; Tim is right to highlight them, and I completely defend them. But I still strong suspect that Chabon has the better argument, if only implicitly: the sort of learning and exploration that we experience together is wonderful, but it tries to do more than it should, and the reason why it tries is because I am taught--by the hysterical warnings of predators on the talk shows, by the competitive mindset of the super-prepared kids in my daughters' classrooms, by the patterns laid down by choices that shape so much of our living environment--that it just isn't worth the risk to allow kids these days to make their own adventuresome way on their own.

To an extent, then, this is a call loosen up, to slack off, and to praise those forms of work and play--and, therefore, also praise the somewhat limited sorts of lifestyles and economies which such forms can allow, as well as sorts of polities and infrastructures which enable more people to purposefully choose such forms, with all their limits--which better leave kids alone: not entirely alone, of course, but alone more often than they are today. I don't mean such a call to be all a mournful "kids these days!" complaint. There are good things which have come along with the responses of parents to the changes of the past thirty years, and I don't want to dismiss or downplay those good things: we aren't 1970s parents, we're 21st-century ones, and happy for it. But if our way of patrolling our children's lives and environments were slightly more slanted towards the more open-ended, more adventuresome options that were already disappearing for us suburbanites when we were kids way back when, our kids, I think, would be even more happy for it as well.

Shop Class as Soulcraft Symposium

This week, Front Porch Republic is going to be running a series of reviews and posts dealing with Matthew Crawford's wonderful, challenging, thought-provoking book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. It is, I am fairly confident in claiming, the single best book yet--philosophically broad-minded but also incisively personal--that I have seen emerge from the whole meandering localist/populist/anti-corporate/anti-modern "crusade" of the past half decade or so. It speaks to matters dealing with education, politics, and economics, but much more than that it speaks to how people engage in and think about--and how people should engage in and think about--the work they do, both with their brains and, more importantly, their hands. But read Patrick Deneen's general introduction to the book (which has garnered an impressive amount of media attention, deservedly so) and the symposium here. My contribution will be showing up, both there and here, towards the end of the week, but follow the whole discussion if you can; it'll be very much worth your time.

Friday Morning Videos: "U Got the Look"

That was fun last week--so let's keep the funk going, with this over-the-top opus from Prince. Seriously--has anyone ever made dressing like a pimp look quite this good?

Thinking About States (and Why There Should be More of Them)

[Not exactly cross-posted at Front Porch Republic, but check out the comments thread there, nonetheless.]

We spent the 4th of July weekend down in Dallas, visiting a friend that we haven't seen in years, and getting a sense of a big slice of the old southwest that, despite coming up on five years in Kansas and numerous trips to Oklahoma during that time, we'd yet to even begin to expose ourselves to. I'm talking about Texas, of course.

It surprised everyone that we mentioned our trip to that we'd never visited the Lone Star state before--no Dallas, no Austin, no San Antonio. We'd flown into and out of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport on a few occasions, but that hardly counts. I did have a job interview once in San Angelo once, way out in western Texas, and the aforementioned friend drove me out there from Dallas, so I saw some of the countryside then. But really, Texas was terra incognita to us. And it still is, of course; there's so much of it, that it's kind of ridiculous to stamp a "been there" star on our map of the U.S. just on the basis of a weekend trip to it's biggest city. (Not that that stopped us from doing so.) But we did get a taste--the green rolling hills that begin at the Arbuckle Mountains (more like tall hills, but you take what you can get) and continue south into the plains around Dallas, the diverse cities and neighborhoods of the Dallas-Fort Worth region (Irving, Arlington, Plano, Denton, and I certainly won't forget the awesome Korean grocery in Carrollton!), the kindly Southern lady who ushered us around the fantastic Nasher Sculpture Center in the Dallas Arts District. Most of all, I got a fabulous, close-up look and taste of a living legend of the Texas music scene, Joe Ely, a country-blues-rocker and singer-songwriter, founding member of the legendary Texas band The Flatlanders, all of whom my Dallas friend had introduced me to years ago. Ely was touring with a band that he'd first formed and recorded with back in the 1980s, and the show--at Billy Bob's, in the Stockyards at Fort Worth--was an awesome showcase for the talent and precision they'd gained from having worked, on the road and in the studio. Fortunately, someone there was more technologically adept than my friend and I, so you can see what you missed:





Too bad our enterprising cell-phone-camera-wielder didn't record Ely's second encore, a tribute to his hometown of Lubbock (the birthplace of Buddy Holly) and to the Rolling Stones: a pounding version of "Not Fade Away." It was very simply one of the best live performances I'd ever seen. Next time, perhaps.

[Update: Our mystery cameraman caught it! Thank you, anonymous commenter, or Scott, or whomever you are. Here it is, for you all:



Call it a tribute to the enduring and cosmopolitan power of great local Texas music, if you will!]

Anyway, one thing the weekend convinced me of--Texas is worth it. And I mean "Texas" not just as a geographic location that incorporates the activities and achievements of whomever happens to make their home or workplace there at any one point in time; I mean "Texas" as a site with a culture, a history, a legacy (in music, food, and other things as well), a way of life. I didn't need much convincing of this, of course; my passion for embeddeness and belonging and authenticity makes me an easy mark for anyone who wants to sell me on the particularity of a place. And, of course, the slogan of "particularity" itself doesn't tell you much about the nature of, the boundaries of, the necessary limits (internal and external) to a place worth being particular about. But all those important questions aside, it's I think indisputable that Texas, at least, has got something, is a home for something, worth holding on to. Would that every community--or, at the outside, every state--could say the same thing. And maybe, just maybe there's something the nation as a whole could do to make that more likely: split some of them up.

Which leads me to an old post of mine, written back in 2005 (and slightly updated here), which speaks to the idea that there ought to be more states. There are some important political and economic considerations to this proposal that the post doesn't address--in some cases because I was aware of the issues but chose not to delve into them, in other cases because they involve questions which I've only come to appreciate as I've studied more about localism in recent years--but I think on a whole, the post stands up well. So herewith, as a belated celebration of our country, a proposal to divide it up even more.

***

When the opportunity arises, I like to take my family to visit Spokane, Washington, where I grew up. Not only does it give us a chance to see extended family, it enables us to ramble around Washington states and other parts of the Pacific Northwest with our kids. Over the years, we've taken them to Seattle and Portland and Coeur d'Alene, and driven back and forth along the Columbia River Gorge, we've taken them to Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens. Whenever I return to Washington, I'm always struck once again by the diverse beauty of its environment: the Cascade Range, the Yakima River Valley, the Palouse Prairie, etc. And, of course, I'm reminded of how much I'd like to divide it up.

The ambition (mostly humorous, but sometimes serious) to carve a new state out of parts of Washington, Idaho, and a little bit of Oregon has been around for a long time; I remember people talking about it when I was a kid. The most reasonable plan usually calls for taking the region often referred to as the "Inland Empire" (here's a rough map) and renaming it "Columbia," with Spokane as its capital, bordered by Canada on the north, Kalispell and Missoula, MT, on the east, Wenatchee and Yakima, WA, on the west, and maybe Baker City, OR, on the south (just so long as we get Hells Canyon). Granted, most of the local people who talk about creating such a state are doing so only because they want to make some sort of point about the ideological divide between the liberal, metropolitan enclaves of Seattle and Portland, and the conservative, mostly rural territory which those areas politically dominate. But if you look at it that way, you force the question of who is really being "served" or "represented" by whatever strange ideological combinations the boundaries of Washington (or any state, for that matter) call into being--and by that standard, poor Eastern Washington benefits a lot more from wealthy Western Washington than local politicians care to admit. Which means, of course, that the debate founders on the usual dispute over economic advantage vs. political liberty, with plenty of mockery and cheerleading to be found on both sides.

I don't see it in those terms however; my concern is more cultural and civic. The whole theoretical point of granting substantive political power to individual states--given that the logic of "one man, one vote" suggests that we ought to actually abolish both the electoral college and the U.S. Senate, and turn the whole United States over to a single unicameral legislature--is the old republican notion (as transformed by James Madison and Co., of course) that people will take their democratic duties as citizens more seriously when they feel a greater attachment to that public of which they are a part. Of course, that's only part of the issue--the historical reason for granting substantive political power to the states in the U.S. had little to do with theory, and a lot to do with the fact that distinct sovereignties existed along the eastern coast of North America, had existed for quite some time, and couldn't be gotten around in any imagining of a new American polity. But still, that factors into the theoretical concern--if you have historical localized attachments, then they need to be constructed, legitimated, and assembled in such a way as to preserve their function in the larger whole. As the country has developed, much of that function has broken down, at least in part due to the unwieldiness of certain state boundaries as they've developed over time. Spokane (despite what some of its boosters claim) doesn't dislike Seattle, anymore than Pendleton dislikes Portland or Bonners Ferry dislikes Boise. They just don't have a lot of mutual affection for each other, that's all. So, why not divide up certain boundaries to reflect the developed history of these places? The result would be along the lines of what Michael Lind suggests: more states, making for more and more balanced representation.

Okay, I admit, Lind's vision of 75 states is a little much. Moreover, Lind is, as always, a purely civic nationalist; his vision is entirely wrapped up his drive to make the American nation a more unified and democratic political body. I'm sympathetic to such national republican concerns, but I also think that Lind's proposal foolishly ignores the cultural and historical aspects of belonging. You can't just divide up states left and right for the sake of representational equivalence, however worthy the goal; the roots of identity begin locally, not with lines drawn for wholly political purposes. Sure, politics is part of it--as I've discussed before, boundary-drawings, like all foundings, is a complicated affair, with outright acts of political will balanced against the pre- (and non-)political elements of "people-making," whether linguistic or geographic or cultural or otherwise. But nonetheless, the affective aspects of identity, as they grow (and change) over time, need to be considered. Which just means that it'd obviously be plain electoral suicide to try to get the Great State of Texas, with all its myth and history, to submit to a break-up. If you're going to be that crazy about it, you might as well throw your lot in with those who advocate annexing British Columbia and Alberta as well. I don't think a purely representative calculus will serve America--to say nothing of eastern Washington--very well. The goal shouldn't be achieve a perfectly responsive representativeness (we arguably already are too addicted to that chimera anyway, what with recall elections and ill-considered election laws hampering the overall process); rather, the goal should be more representation in general. Where possible, where the people's sympathies clearly support it, let's have more states, with a larger Congress and more representatives serving the people on a smaller, more affective basis. (Which will also, I think, also turn out to be more effective--but that's, as I say, a separate matter.) Moreover, let's start with my Inland Empire homeland (and let's do it soon, before my father is too old to run for governor).

What other new states do I think are plausible? Western Kansas, unfortunately, almost certainly isn't, but there are other candidates out there was well; Lind's list, over-enthusiastic as it is, contains some obvious possibilities. Clearly, California should be split up--it's too large, spread out and disconnected as a population for current arrangements to be defensible, to say nothing of economically sustainable. Plus, there's precedent for northern California separating itself; consider the proposed state of "Jefferson". Splitting up New Jersey, perhaps in conjunction of some redrawn boundaries within New York and Pennsylvania, would follow natural population lines. (No doubt Long Island would love to be its own state.) I'd personally like to give Michigan's Upper Peninsula back to Wisconsin, since that makes more sense geographically, but dividing the state along a north-south line, giving the U.P. to the western half and forming a new state out of the Detroit area and the "thumb" probably wouldn't cause too many tears (at least not if my Ann Arbor-raised wife's opinion is any indication). And that doesn't even begin to address harder cases, like Puerto Rico. But this would give us 5 new states, and they'd be fairly evenly divided between "red" and "blue" too, on my reading. Why not 55 states? We could add another line of stars to the flag, don't you think?

Friday Morning Videos: "Living in America"

Tomorrow's the Fourth! So get yer funk on.



Also tomorrow, let's remember to take a moment to be grateful that, thanks to patriots like Apollo Creed and Rocky Balboa, the Cold War came to a mostly peaceful conclusion.

Laura Explains the Blogosphere at the Present Time

Blogger supreme Laura McKenna has just laid out her observations about how blogging has evolved over the six years she's been at it. I can't disagree with any of her conclusions; I really think she's nailed it. Here's her conclusion:

Blogging has changed a lot in the past six years. It's still an excellent medium for self-expression and professional networking, but it will no longer make mega-stars. It's actually a good thing that the hoopla has died down. No one should spend that much time in front of a computer. The expectations were unrealistic. Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you'll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal -- a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that's why I'm continuing to keep at.

Sounds good to me. But be sure to head over there for her full list, and the comments thread.

Canada Day Round-Up

Happy Canada Day to my friends in Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere across the Great White North. Herewith, a few Canadian hits from blog posts past:

Some old thoughts of mine about Canada, Red Tories, conservatism and Stephen Harper, slightly updated for Front Porch Republic, can be found here.

Some not-quite-so-old thoughts, focusing on communitarianism, Quebec, the philosophy of Charles Taylor and the fate of Canada, can be found here.

Because it sparked such a fine and fun comments thread last time around, here it is again--my Top 10 Things I Like About Canada list:

10) Rush, Barenaked Ladies, The Guess Who, and Gordon Lightfoot. I have no idea if one could make a cultural argument that there is anything particularly Canadian that all of them share, but anyway, my life would be worse without them.

9) Red Tories. A historical label which not only reflected pretty much exactly the sort of democratic political ideology (economically agrarian and egalitarian, politically communitarian, culturally traditionalist, religiously Christian) that I like, but which also describes a variety of relatively successful real-world political movements and politicians that--had I been a Canadian voter 50 years ago--would have had very close to my complete support, maybe even more than America's own Populists from a century or more ago would have gotten from me. (Forget about Harper's Conservatives and the New Democratic Party, everyone: let's bring the old Progressive Conservatives and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation!)

8) Point Peele National Park. A small peninsula jutting southward from the Canadian mainland into Lake Erie, it's a beautiful stretch of forest and beach where my wife's family--she grew up in Michigan--used to spend their July 4th holidays (a smart way to avoid the crowds and get some good swimming in).

7) Relative avoidance of sugar processed from high fructose corn syrup. Once when we were visiting the Ontario Science Centre, we saw a display--in some sort of health exhibit--on the manufacturing of sugar and the relative amounts consumed by residents of the U.S. and residents of Canada. Our sugar consumption towered over theirs...primarily because most of our sugar intake comes from corn syrup, which we put into everything. It was an early part of our determination to change what we eat.

6) Speaking of food...Shreddies. Enough said.

5) Toronto. Yes, it's too big, and too expensive, and it dominates English-speaking Canada's economic, cultural, political and intellectual life to an unjustifiable degree. But a cleaner, more multicultural, more fun big city you're not likely ever to find.

4) Socialized medicine. Of course, it's not really socialized medicine; various levels of government only cover a little over two-thirds of all heath care costs in the country, and the providers are a patchwork of government-run, for-profit, and non-profit organizations. But it's universal care, and your basic medical needs don't cost you an arm and a leg (sometimes literally), and besides, my oldest friend from graduate school, James Meloche, helps run one of the Local Health Integration Networks in Ontario. That's good enough for me.

3) The intellectual problem of Canada. Why do I find Canada's perpetual crises over language rights, sovereignty, religious freedom and more, as embodied in questions about constitutionality, Quebec's unique cultural and political status, and the future of the Canadian federation itself--and reflected in documents from the Constitution Act to the Meech Lake Accord to today's Commission on Accommodation--so engaging and admirable? Because they actually exist: it's political theory made real. Unlike other nations that ponder in the abstract about nationality and identity, in Canada you find all these issues, which are usually just fodder for pretentious intellectuals like myself, being treated with great seriousness by actual politicians and parties and voters. The fact that our divided neighbors to the north have been able to survive intact--as a distinct nation with the smaller nation of Quebec still a part of it, despite all the conflicts and all the talk of separation for so long--is due to the hard work and aspirations of millions of ordinary Canadians who have taken the time to think and talk about sort of difficult matters which most citizens in most democratic societies would prefer to leave alone, so all credit to them. (Though, to give pretentious intellectuals a nod, it's probably not a coincidence that Canada has produced some of truly profound political thinkers, none more so than Charles Taylor, the--in my opinion--greatest political and moral philosopher of the 20th century.)

2) SCTV. Better than Monty Python? Um...no, not really. But better than any of the many incarnations of Saturday Night Live over the years? Oh yes, definitely.

1) The loonie. Why have a one-dollar coin? For luck, of course.

And finally, some parting and very Canadian advice for all of us, from Bob and Doug McKenzie and Geddy Lee:

What's Modernity Marx Got to Do With It?

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic.]

Blogger though I am, I can't deny that there is a major advantage to arguments conducted through the slower media of paper (to say nothing of peer-reviewed publishing): because the length of time between claims and counter-claims is longer, it is somewhat more possible to step back and get clear on just what it is that everyone is claiming. I'm not Luddite (or, as Susan McWilliams would perhaps put it, hypocritical) enough to wish the internet away and resolve to restrict myself to the discipline of the palimpsest, but I confess to somewhat wishing for those kind of belabored traces and delays to help me make it through the mutlifaceted argument which has erupted between my colleagues at Front Porch Republic and the writers at the Postmodern Conservative blog over the past few days. Still, let me try to explain the argument as I understand it.

[Obligatory pop reference] No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

It started with a couple of brief comments made by Pomocons Peter Lawler and Ivan Kenneally, expressing serious disagreement with what they see as the "polis envy" expressed by Patrick Deneen, the localists of FPR, and other "true deep communitarians" who worry too much about the "material conditions" necessary for community and tradition to flourish. Those comments were noticed by Jason Joseph, who saw in them a harbinger of a major conflict over the direction of American conservatism: should conservatives "embrace democratic capitalism while rejecting its Enlightenment presuppositions," or should they "reject modernity outright"? (Jason here is perhaps unintentionally echoing Damon Linker, who labels those who congregate around FPR and similar sites as "reactionaries," which is mildly disconcerting for leftists like myself who write over there.) A few weeks later, Patrick threw down the gauntlet on the FPR website and, well, the debate rolled onward (and continues) from there.

The possibility that this argument really comes down how one responds to modernity in general (and modern liberal democracy and democratic capitalism in particular) is clearly true in some important way or another. It's a possibility which appears to me to be essentially reflected in Patrick's framing of the dispute around "nature’s laws and limits." Under this reading, Pomocons affirm that the modern individual, understood as a being in possession of natural rights, obviously still longs for virtue and a context within which to realize and practice such, but is also confident that there are opportunities for virtue concomitant with all the social transformations which modernity has brought with it, as nature still abides. Hence, the "restlessness and alienation" which thinking conservatives of all stripes note about the modern world is best supplemented with an "easy-going quiescence." In contrast to this, the FPR position is presumably a more radical one, whereby modern life's obsession with technology and growth (of economic possibility and personal individuation and choice) is seen as possibly resulting in "a potentially catastrophic confrontation with natural limits and attendant human suffering." Hence, the need for a "reactionary" response, one which Lawler humorously characterized as an "it takes a medieval village" attitude, and which Kenneally, most seriously, indicts as an attitude which "embrace[s] certain conditions that make free moral life optimally possible but then reduce[s] the possibility of that freedom to the historical circumstances within which it emerges." Lawler's and Kennally's view may not be entirely fair to the distinction which Patrick introduces--and which he moderates in several comments--but it is not, I think, fundamentally untrue to it, as Patrick ultimately sets up the FPR position as one which posits nature and the virtues associated with such in opposition to modernity, claiming that, as admirable the benefits of modern life may be to the development of the human person, "modern goods are only worthy of being embraced because we are not living wholly in modernity." This all perhaps coincides with James Poulos's assessment of the debate, which suggests again that the real issue is what we think of modernity: "Front Porchers seem inclined to treat liberalism as the false consciousness inculcated to justify modernity, or some such, while Pomocons, I think, are inclined to recognize that liberalism is not simply a symptom of modernity."

All well and good, I suppose....except that it can't quite explain why on earth I'm here. Why would a paleoconservative blog have invited an Obama-voter and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a person who is ambivalent about and even occasionally willing to defend public schooling and Obama's economic plans, to contribute here? For that matter, why would they do the same for FPR's whole "left wing" camp, as Bob Cheeks put it, what with our attacks on capitalism, our defenses of government-funded family-leave policies, our praise of steady-state green and social democratic economies, our affirmations of positive freedom and land distribution and a government capable of carrying such out? I suppose that any one of such points of view, depending on how they are expressed, might well be acceptable to some conservatives of the old school, but for all their variety and for all their distinct philosophical grounds and justifications, overall such positions are, I believe, simply too close to the egalitarian ideas advocated by modern progressives and liberals to sit well with those who reject modernity root and branch. As I see it, the reactionary/paleoconservative stream of American conservatism has always been generally unwilling to take seriously "equality," however defined, as a virtue relevant to the good life. This means that, whatever suspicions FPR localists and communitarians share about modern life alongside traditional conservatives, traditional conservatism doesn't like populism, and has an ambiguous relationship with democracy at best, and while you may be able to find some echoes of that here and there on FPR, I think you're much more likely to find the opposite (even when we debate Lincoln, the issue is basically over how he wielded power, not the ends for which he wielded it).

It seems to me that the truth is that, as FPR has developed, its primary theme has thus not been a resistance to the trends of democracy and equality in modern history, with attendant conceptualizations of the nature of the individual and their rights and how all of may relate to the foregoing. Not to say that such isn't an important intellectual debate, nor to deny that there are writers at FPR who very clearly adopt such an approach, but it is not, I think, what primarily motivates those who worry about the fate of the front porch. You can accommodate on said porch a variety of understandings of, and recommendations for, individual persons seeking virtue in the midst of modernity's engagement with (conquest of?) the natural world. What brings us to the porch, first and foremost, I think, is the first of the three words in our subhead--not "liberty" (whether individual or otherwise), not "limits" (of nature or of something else), but "place." Which is why, as I said in my first contribution to this argument, and which I still believe a few days of comment-tracking later, the back-and-forth snarking about Marx--with attendant commentary from many others--is actually pretty important to what we're actually all about.

Lawler's insight into the Rousseauian and romantic commonalities between agrarian/localist diagnoses of the modern condition and Marxist/socialist ones is actually pretty trenchant and accurate, I think most especially because--and, given the way the liberationist left so often misunderstood and abused social democratic understandings of solidarity in the past, perhaps it is not surprising that this should come as a surprise to many people--it unintentionally underscores the relevance of authority (the authority of tradition, of community, of a people joined together in a common project of respect and participation) to what agrarians, localists, and, yes, Front Porchers, insist is crucial to a proper understanding of the meaning of "place." I'll draw here upon something I've written before about Normal Mailer's on-first-glance-weird-but-in-fact-quite-profound claim that he wished to "think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke":

[Mailer] wants to be an egalitarian, but he doesn't want to be a liberal, because liberalism simply isn't compatible, in his thinking, with "family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance" and other "dependable human virtues"....[His belief was] that the modern world has been fundamentally conditioned by...abstractions and transformations[;]...traditions and communities cannot exercise the same authority they once did in a world in which individual subjectivity has conditioned our very understanding of the self (at least in the West--but increasingly, most everywhere else as well)....Marx...recognized the truth of the Burkean (though for him it was really more Hegelian, and therefore Rousseauian) insight into the connection between consciousness and communal, historical, material reality. Repairing the human consciousness did not mean a continuing project of subjective liberation, with the aim of making the burdens of modernity privately manageable, but rather addressing issues of power and and place and production that make the transformations of modernity--and most particularly the spaital ones, with solid traditions and properties and roles and locales evaporating into the thin air of free trade and the cash economy--into alienating burdens in the first place....[T]he Rousseauian perspective says, okay, our original, grounded nature has been lost, we're in chains....Rousseau's response [to this problem, and thus Marx's too] preserves true conservative seriousness...it respects the need for embeddedness and connection by suggesting that we remake our chains--that we remake modernity, and resist those who would portray our restless condition as a fait accompli, the emergence of which was inherent to our natures. Why can we do that? Because within and through modernity the deep structure abides; we're just having difficulties actualizing it, because we've been so intent in fighting internecine battles within liberalism that we've ignored all the other ways in which we could be responding to the world.

The position I articulate here is heavily influenced by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who argues for an alternative understanding of modernity, one in which the ecology of modern life itself reveals a consciousness of, and need for, traditionally and communally realized moral instincts and epiphanies. Modern liberal and egalitarian goods are real, this position says, but they must not be allowed to interfere with or supplant--as opposed to being articulated so as to complement--the authority of more necessary, traditional, local, communal goods. Moreover, this position follows Hegel and the romantic tradition (which itself drew upon older, mystical ones) in acknowledging that there is a subjective, constructed, generally willed aspect to our deep structure, and those traditional and communal goods which reflect it; it sees that structure as something which emerges and thus must be regularly re-articulated and contextually realized. In Rousseau's philosophy, this willed engagement with and the movement to preserve communal grounds in the midst of history had a tragic character to it. Marx, to his eternal discredit, dismissed with that sense of tragedy, embracing instead a historical materialism and a determinism which ultimately justified thousands in seeing themselves (and the states they would take control of) as vanguards to bring Marxist solidarity or death to the millions of people. Nothing remotely admirable about any of that, to be sure. But Marx's diagnosis of modern liberal life, and in particular of the weight and the alienating cost of our the loss of structures and traditions and thoroughly material connection with the work of our hands and with our fellow man, rings absolutely true.

Clearly, what I'm laying out here doesn't represent the common self-understanding of the FPR community (some of whom would reject even labeling it a community); I don't know if there are any other Taylor fans there besides myself, though there is at least one Norman Mailer fan. As for Marx, more than a few FPRers are willing to acknowledge the significance of his approach to the question of modern liberalism, but is that acknowledgment any different from that which is offered by Pomocons, such as in the post from Lawler I cited above, or that which they confessed to on their site way back at the beginning? Perhaps not on the level of theory, but on the level of practice, I think so. Of the great many "practical" posts that have appeared on FPR, the percentage that have any sort of connection with Marx's analysis of alienation, commodification, and forms of production is very nearly zero...except, of course, for their deep communitarian willingness to talk about different forms of association, organization, distribution, and expression which would allow--and, different political and cultural and socio-economic reforms, both high and low, which would enable and extent--the doing of things differently with one's occupations and talents and property and education and land and position in life.

It perhaps reveals something important that Ralph Hancock, on the Pomocon website, acknowledges that Pomocons are more "politically realistic," being "regime-thinkers" who see the need to "making friends with real political forces," so as to influence the public, political realm and thereby protect and preserve virtues which flourish privately. Which, again, might well seem to be exactly the sort of thing mentioned up above (supporting--and paying for--certain activies for the sake of empowering people on their porches), save for the fact that Marxist/Rousseauian/socialist/localist/republican/populist/agrarian/what-have-you critiques put the division of public and private into question, asking whether or not it isn't the emergence of a "regime"--particularly a liberal one--in the first place that necessarily marks off that which the people, as defenders of their places, ought to be able to exercise some real sovereignty over. I can certainly be criticized for being an Obama-voter (hey, I can criticize myself for it!), but at least I don't think I've ever made the mistake of thinking that the partisan and electoral system which produced him and his agenda ever were or could be tools for setting the inherently discursive, dialogic, and thus political nature of our moral and communal lives right, which the theoconservative and First Things crowds in general have been occasionally tempted to believe the Republican party could and should do. To be sure, the platform of the Democratic party--particularly in its more progressive bureaucratic or judicial incarnations--does the same. Which only goes to show, I think, the need to constantly search for alternatives, to happily (if perhaps only partially) embrace the stupid accusation which Jonah Goldberg threw at Rod Dreher long ago (that the Crunchy Con movement, and all those sympathetic to it, are implicated in "Christian Marxism" and Fabian socialism, posing like "Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a Russell Kirk mask"), and, most importantly, to--as Mailer put it--think like Marx (and Chrisopher Lasch, and Wendell Berry, and Ivan Illich, and Dorothy Day, and Juliet Schor, and...). Doing so, I think at least, gives us our best chance to get out from under the regimented regime supports--the parties and profitability margins--which, as Sheldon Wolin put it while speaking of John Locke, turn around the traditional question of "what type of political order is required if society is to be maintain?" (a properly conservative question if there every was one), replacing it instead with the question "what social arrangements will insure the continuity of government?" I know, from my own association with them, that the Pomocons certainly don't believe that just so long as society and culture and the manufacture of profits follow the meritocracy, we have no truly fundamental problem. It is interesting, though, to see them raise eyebrows and doubts and sniggers at those who figure, as radicals of all sorts always have, that since that isn't true, something ought to be done about it.

This turned into another one of my long navel-gazing posts, which is likely to be of interest to about eight people tops. So let me finish it off my pointing at this fine contribution by James Poulos, in which he asks questions that are more humble, and as such admit to no easy theoretical demarcations: how does one balance loves for embedded communities versus perhaps "superficial" but nonetheless just as authentically affections for contemporary life? Can individuals through their own ethical choices really ever resolve such dilemmas, or must people operate in solidarity and community with one another to do so? And if the latter, which community, on what level of abstraction, if any? I have my answers to some of those, and no doubt he has his, as does probably everyone who has gotten tangled up in this argument one way or another. All our answers are, to be sure, tentative. Which I guess makes me glad that I'm just writing a blog post here after all.

Additional In Memoriam Friday Morning Videos: "Billie Jean"

I'd already scheduled my entry for Friday Morning Videos for this morning, and I'll stick with it; Michael Penn deserves the attention. But on the bike ride into work this morning, I realized it was idiotic not to mention the passing of Michael Jackson somehow. So for all of you who had--or, like me, who had older sisters who had--posters of Jackson all over the bedroom (my favorite: the close-up of his shoes, balanced precariously on their tips, the bejeweled socks glittering from the spotlights in the distant background), here's the video that changed everything. Not Jackson's biggest hit or video, not his most outrageous, not his most creepy and disturbing, but very simply, the one that changed all the rules, and made MTV and the 80s Michael Jackson's playground.



Oh, wait, you wanted to see it live? John Buass has it for you, right here.

Update: Damon Linker calls my attention to this fine comment from Andrew Sullivan:

There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child. By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father. He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one. He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age - and never recovered. Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.

But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence. Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell.

I loved his music. His young voice was almost a miracle, his poise in retrospect eery, his joy, tempered by pain, often unbearably uplifting. He made the greatest music video of all time; and he made some of the greatest records of all time. He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.

I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours' and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

I hope he has the peace now he never had in his life. And I pray that such genius will not be so abused again.

Friday Morning Videos: "No Myth"

Here's a neglected gem by Michael Penn. After the Cars with their post-New Wave sound, some simple singer-songwriter guitar work is to be appreciated.