What Emporia (and Kansas) Has Lost

[Two weeks ago, Emporia State University President Ken Hush pushed through a plan that allowed him to engage in a devastating "restructuring" of this small, beautiful state university in southeastern Kansas. I wrote a piece about it last week; this is a slightly expanded and updated version.]

The sad news coming out of Emporia, with at least 30 members of the faculty of Emporia State University fired on a single day, did not garner much attention state-wide. (The best source of news about what's been done to ESU continues to be The Bulletin, produced by the journalism students at Emporia State, a program that has now been halted, along with more than 30 others.) That’s unfortunate, and not just because the firings were a terrible blow to the education of hundreds of ESU students. It’s unfortunate because the changes at Emporia reflect a misunderstanding of what I think--as a non-tenured (by choice) university professor at Friends University in Wichita, KS--higher education in Kansas realistically is all about, and what it can aspire to be.

The population of Kansas as a whole is growing at a slow pace, relative to the rest of the country—with a few of the states heavily urbanized counties increasing in size at a decent pace, but with our more expansive rural areas mostly shrinking in population, sometimes quite dramatically. This is the reality which all the universities and community colleges operating under the Kansas Board of Regents umbrella, and all the different independent liberal arts colleges across Kansas, have to deal with. Add to the decline of potential college students the burden of tuition costs, the plentitude of educational alternatives, and the many re-evaluations which the pandemic brought on, and it is obvious that Kansas’s colleges and universities must rethink how they do business.

Which they have done, and continue to do. It is wrong to suppose that the faculty who teach classes, run workshops, administer internships, and provide training are removed from the kind of hard choices and experimental strategies which the aforementioned pressures make necessary. On the contrary, it is those faculty who do the legwork in figuring out how to combine old programs or innovate new ones, and reconstruct majors and courses to reflect diverse student needs. This has happened multiple times at my institution in the years that I’ve taught here, and almost all the faculty I know here in Kansas, whether at large institutions or small ones, have gone through the same.

Why do all that extra work? There are cynical answers, to be sure: "you'll lose your job, otherwise" is an easy snark. But that cynical take cannot fully account for the immense creativity and resources which Kansas's higher education teachers regularly dedicate to keeping what they do both institutionally solvent and educationally successful. So mostly, I believe it’s because the teachers at those institutions have committed themselves to teaching Kansas students, and that means meeting them where they are: in all those diverse cities and towns, large and small, in all those distinct regions, both rural and urban and in-between, and developing unique educational approaches to serve all those different student needs. It means making our colleges and universities “native to this place,” to quote Kansan Wes Jackson—and that requires the knowledge which only long-term job support makes possible.

Which is exactly what President Ken Hush has undermined at Emporia State, by getting permission from KBOR to fire tenured faculty without any particular explanation. He sold it as grand plan in “workforce management,” dismissing incremental approaches to re-developing ESU as insufficient. Perhaps Hush sees this as an ideological win over a bunch of supposed radicals weighing down the efficient, education-to-job, libertarian machine that he perhaps imagines that ESU could or should otherwise be, but he's deeply misinformed. In practice tenure—which varies greatly from one institution to another—doesn’t promise faculty any kind of lifetime promise of intellectual isolation from the pressures and shifts of the educational landscape. Rather, by providing a degree of job protection (like due process guarantees that they will not be hurriedly or arbitrarily terminated, not unlike the job protections enjoyed by police officers, fire fighters, public school teachers, and many more), tenure enables those with the necessary expertise to take the time to build creative, lasting connections in the midst of students’ ever-changing educational needs and situations. A building which Hush’s decision has now made harder at ESU, crossing a line which Kansas higher education really can’t afford to break.

In our slow-growth state, tenure is probably best understood as one of several policies that makes more likely--for at least some, anyway--the sort of job security and intellectual stability which is necessary if committed faculty, those who choose to root themselves in the particular, sometimes shrinking, Kansas communities their various institutions serve, are to develop a real connection to both their students and the diverse topics of study which can bless their lives. Emporia State did that, in teacher education, in library science, and much more, just as Fort Hays and Pittsburg State and my own Friends University also do so, in their own specific ways. One can only hope that ESU will be able to continue to provide some of that unique service to those Kansas students who need it—but it will be harder now, and that’s a shame.

A Random Thought on Mikey Kaus

A few days ago Robert Farley, of Lawyers, Guns & Money, posted the latest entry in his wonderful "Oral History of the Blogosphere" project, this one focusing on the once-notorious (indeed, widely loathed on the liberal/left/progressive side of the blogosphere), but now mostly-just-grumbled-over journalist and blogger, Mickey Kaus. It's actually a pretty great conversation, if you're into remembering or rethinking what people were arguing about online and why and how they did it, circa 20001-2010. For me, besides enjoying it as I have enjoyed every previous entry in this series (really, if you're a blogger or ever thought you could be one you should listen to them all), it made me reflect on the enduring relevance of a particular ideological niche, however tiny or incoherent it may seem.

I never thought, and still don't think, the loathing of Kaus was mostly due to the controversial positions he took on the dominant political news items in America in the 1990s and 2000s: welfare reform, criminal justice, immigration, the Iraq War, etc. Rather, I think he was loathed because he insisted--to the minds of the aforementioned liberal/left/progressive pundit class, infuriatingly so--that he was taking those positions as a sincere, if appropriately evolved, New Deal Democrat. In a way, I think Kaus occupies the same much-condemned rhetorical space as Ralph Nader: he's someone who is seen as a betrayer, someone who talks the talk of liberal justice and then engages in public actions and intervenes in public debates that seem, to most liberals and leftists and progressives, to entirely contrary to how the liberal political world actually works.

The first minutes of the conversation with Kaus touched upon the legacy of Charles Peters and the magazine he founded, Washington Monthly, which tutored legions of journalists (including Kaus) in a vision of activist government grounded, as Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly's long-time editor, put it, in "the communitarian patriotic liberalism of Peters’s New Deal youth." There are, out there amid the sprawling, multifaceted coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party, lines of reflection upon the achievements of the New Deal, both scholarly and activist, which seriously downplay the ethical and civic part of that triumph of positive liberalism and egalitarianism. According to those arguments, the greatest achievement of the New Deal was that it laid the foundation for erecting social democratic institutions in America, for which many are still fighting for: to make health care a human right, to make higher education available to all, to put workers in charge of the economy, etc. As a democratic socialist myself, I agree with those lines of argument! But I'm also a sometime left conservative, a wanna-be civic republican, and a fan of both Christopher Lasch and the Point Huron Statement, and thus find myself agreeing with Peters as well. The leadership of the post-New Deal, and particularly the post-civil rights movement, Democratic Party really did focus mostly on achieving liberal justice through building ever-more effective (and ever-larger) redistributive institutions and practices. The way that focus partly (but not entirely unintentionally) combined a very un-New Dealish individualism with outright bureaucratic statism, and allowed a entirely new kind of meritocracy to flourish in liberal circles, thus taking the focus off the cultural and communal aspects of what a genuinely egalitarian and just society must involve...well, that's the critical space which Kaus occupied. Entirely coherently? In a philosophically rigorous way? Open-mindedly, kindly, and without self-indulgent contrarian snark? Not at all; in many ways, Kaus's voice was a profoundly flawed vehicle for this critical perspective on post-Cold War liberalism in America. But to my mind, at least, he was a vehicle for it all the same.

My primary evidence for this is a wonderful book that he wrote, The End of Equality. The book never got the respect it deserved, I think, partly because of the weird moment it arrived (right at the beginning of the Clinton administration; but was the book arguing against what Clinton was doing, or supporting it, or both?), and partly because Kaus's subsequent career--intransigently defending some of the worst aspects of Clinton's welfare reform, obsessing about family breakdown even as income inequality skyrocketed, etc.--retrospectively made the book's insistence that "Money Liberalism" was a non-starter and that "Civic Liberalism" was the way to go seem like Kaus was auditioning George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" a decade before it nominally (though never actually) arrived. All those criticisms are fair. But I still use selections from the book in my Political Ideologies classes on occasion, because I find so much of it refreshingly clear and free of cant. He is frank about his conviction that most of those with socialist aspirations have been unwilling to recognize the incompatibility of "fraternity, community, and idealism" with the lack of "material prosperity" that only rapacious capitalism seems to provide (p. 11); he is genuinely eloquent in asserting that differing levels of health care don't actually matter to the egalitarian legitimacy of society so much as "that everyone wait in the same waiting rooms" (p. 93); and he is downright prescient in warning that, if the goal of the Democratic party continued to be tweaking the tax code in some Rawlsian way so as to make it fairer and increase the size of welfare checks but in the meantime said nothing about the lack of community-feeling and solidarity in America, the end result will a general hardening of whatever egalitarian spirit the revolutions of the 1930s and the 1960s may have left us with:

Americans may be social egalitarians today. But give the affluent two more decades to revile the underclass and avoid the cities as if they were a dangerous foreign country, two decades to isolate their "gifted" children from their supposed inferiors, two decades of "symbolic analysis" and assortative mating, and we might wake up to discover that Americans aren't such egalitarians at all any more. Then politics would be really dispiriting (p. 180).

That paragraph can be picked apart and even partly undermined in multiple ways (that large numbers of younger and mostly liberal-learning people, including young families, started returning to America's cities throughout the 2000s is the most obvious rejoinder, but not the only one). But I read it, and I see the once at least moderately liberal suburbs, filled with college-educated, white-collar-job-holding, mostly well-off Americans, voting for Trump across large parts of America. Dispiriting indeed.

Anyway, this is just something that occurred to me, when Robert unintentionally invited Kaus back into my mind. So I thank him for that.

Taking (Democratic) Control of One's Own Traffic

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

That Charles Marohn is a friend to localist movements across the United States and beyond is indisputable. It’s not just that he has said so, repeatedly; both the whole operating premise of Strong Towns, the organization he has built, and the strategy it has followed, has been localist: encouraging ordinary people to attend to their own localities by gathering together, sharing information and concerns about the places where they live, and addressing those problems in small, organic, achievable ways. As I wrote in praise of his first book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, while Marohn may not be a trained social critic or political philosopher, he has nonetheless, through his insistence upon the necessity of slowly and democratically adapting our urban places in the direction of greater fiscal and environmental sustainability, articulated as clear and as practical a localist theory as almost any other thinker writing today.

The title of Marohn’s new book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (whose release date is today--buy it now!), might suggest a wonky doubling down upon the practical at the expense of the broadly theoretical, and that judgment isn’t wrong. By connecting this set of interconnected reflections to what Marohn now recognizes as the flawed design principles and professional assumptions he internalized during his decades of road-building work as a civil engineer, he has written a book more in the style of a technical manual than a philosophical treatise. But that doesn’t mean the philosophy isn’t there. In the midst short, data-heavy discussions of travel times, risk assessments, speed studies, Marohn’s ideas are very much still present, and in some ways they’re more political than ever.

The fundamental focus in this book is traffic, meaning the movement of people and goods along streets and roads, which is literally the lifeblood, the circulatory system, of any urbanized space. (In a book with more than its share of good lines, Marohn’s two-sentence take-down of the over-inflated complaints about traffic congestion we are all guilty of is perhaps my favorite: “People often say that they are ‘stuck in traffic,’ as if their vehicle is somehow not a literal part of the traffic in which they are stuck. They are not stuck in traffic; they are traffic”—pg. 84.) One doesn’t have to be a student of Gibbons v. Ogden and the Supreme Court’s commerce clause jurisprudence to recognize that this in an inherently political topic, with ramifications for economics, culture, government, and sometimes life and death. Marohn opens the book with the story of a haunting traffic accident, the lessons of which he returns to throughout the chapters that follow, and ends the book with another accident, one that involved himself. He does this not to politicize tragedies or near-tragedies, but rather the show the degree to which human mistakes are enabled by decisions regarding the construction and management of traffic, decisions whose political values should be available to us, but usually are not.  

This is Marohn’s goal in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:  to reveal the undemocratic—because rarely discussed and almost never subject to actual civic input—values which underlie the traffic regime that American cities are overwhelmingly subject to. Chapter after chapter, Marohn, with the zeal of a penitent convert, digs into the practices and norms of civil engineers like himself, teaching his readers—usually with impressive clarity—about LOS (Level of Service) rankings, MUTCD (Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices) warrants, the economic and sociological distinction between “streets” and “roads,” the 85^th Percentile Speed rule, and much more. By so doing, Marohn carefully details the disconnect between the people who actually live in urban areas, and those who are tasked with designing the circulatory systems which enable them to move about. That is, he succinctly shows how streets, roads, intersections, traffic signage, bus stops, and more are constructed so as to incentivize—or impel—drivers to act in ways disconnected from—or completely contrary to—what those same people, when truly presented with the full range of traffic options, generally prioritize.

So just what do people—what do we—generally prioritize? Mostly safety and cost, even when such stand in the way of maximizing traffic capacity and speed. Unsurprisingly, the language and methods of urban design in America today (and for most of the past 70 years) privilege the opposite. That does not mean America’s cities care nothing about safety or cost: on the contrary, city leaders hear citizen complaints and respond to them all the time…only usually in ways that complete fail to get at the opaque values at work in the bureaucratic contexts which so often shape our urban environments.

So, insofar as safety is concerned, it would be hard to find an American city dweller who isn’t familiar with wide streets clearly built for speed…which have subsequently been filled with traffic warnings, broken up with poorly coordinated signal lights, and closely attended by police conducting a near-abusive number of traffic stops (the symbiotic relationship here should be obvious). Or, insofar as cost is concerned, it would be equally hard to find an urban resident in America who can’t point to expansive and soaring highway interchanges or grand elevated thoroughfares gracing their city…while at the same time debt-payments and budget cuts and arbitrary ceilings on tax collection have left the basic maintenance of the city’s streets and roads further and further behind. These situations are both common and perverse, the result of city governments attempting to sincerely respond to genuine problems without daring to rethink the decision-making which got them there.

What would that rethinking consist of? Perhaps designing smaller streets for slower speeds and less carrying capacity in the first place. Perhaps organizing city finances so as to serve local sites of commercial intercourse and thus moderating and diversifying traffic flow from its start. And thereby perhaps lessening the overall debt taken on by America’s urban areas, freeing up money for already-existing maintenance obligations. In other words, perhaps the option of actually choosing not to privilege the top-down growth of a city’s traffic footprint, but instead choosing to privilege “more corner stores and neighborhood businesses…more local jobs and housing options…[more] sidewalks and biking infrastructure…more alternative ways to respond to congestion” (pg. 98). That these choices are politically difficult is obvious: the assumption that faster traffic is superior to slower traffic, that automobile access to distant locations is superior to bike or pedestrian access to local destinations, that minimizing automobile delay is superior to making room for transportation alternatives, and that speculative economic growth is superior to preserving community wealth, are all, in the civil engineering and urban design professions, a kind of “orthodoxy” (pg. 12). But that they remain, nonetheless, politically possible is Marohn’s fervent call. By supply his readers with the relevant data, Marohn's Confessions helps explain how.

This push against the presumed necessity of over-building, the supposed “inevitability” of the growth machine in American cities (as Marohn facetiously writes in the book’s introduction, which humorously expands upon his justly famous “Conversation with an Engineer” video, civil engineers are “really in the growth business”—pg. xviii), is what makes his localism populist in the spirit of Wendell Berry, who labeled this same cult of inevitability in The Art of Loading Brush “an economic and technological determinism.“ It’s also what makes his localism profoundly political. In the end, for all it’s technical, economic, psychological, and environmental details, Confessions is a plea for local democracy, as Marohn makes clear throughout the book, from beginning…

[Decisions about street safety, speed, capacity, and cost] are policy decision, and like all policy decisions, they should be decided by some duly elected or appointed collection of public officials. In a democratic system of representative government, representatives of the people should be provided the full range of options and be allowed to weigh them against each other. That rarely happens, and I have never heard of an instance where it has happened for a local street (pg. 6).

…to end:

None of these decisions [regarding all the supposed obstacles to making a busy street more pedestrian friendly] are merely technical; they are all somewhat discretionary and, thus, political….Cities are not powerless. Great local engineers who want to assert the values of the community, instead of opposing them, can become strong advocates….All...common methods of thwarting the public will are merely assertions of power. The engineer has knowledge and access to information that elected officials and the public do not. This makes the engineer a gatekeeper….There are ways to deal with this problem, most of which involve shifting power away from the engineer and the systems which empower their values….There are many great engineers out there ready to prioritize public safety over traffic speed and neighborhood prosperity over traffic volume. There are a lot of engineers ready to step out from behind the shield provided by industry standards and fulfill their ethical obligations to use their professional judgment in the service of the public. Any city council wanting to can find these people, empower them, and then support them so they can do great things (pgs. 209-210).

My reference to Wendell Berry above—whose work has inspired many writers at Strong Towns—is intentional. The political expression of localism is often derided as mere nostalgia at worst, or only appropriate for the increasingly small portion of the American population which lives in rural areas at best. Marohn is no agrarian. But here he shows us a practical localism, one centered upon the admittedly wonky technical and financial designing, building, and maintaining of America’s circulatory systems of traffic, but nonetheless as reflective of the same localist democratic ideals as anything produced within America’s agrarian or Tocquevillian traditions. No, Marohn is not a theorist, and not every argument or example or chapter in this book is intellectually consistent. But enough of them do for me to say: if only traffic engineers and urban designers read this book, the localist cause will have missed out on something great indeed.

Regarding Mutualism, Cooperativism, and Other (Interstitially) Anti-Capitalist Alternatives

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

If future historians wish to find some silver lining in COVID-19, the rise in mutualism in response to the shut-downs and dislocations it made necessary may be a good candidate. Community gardens, neighborhood associations, right-to-repair networks, business co-ops, crowd-sourcing approaches to providing health care and jobs and basic financial support: all increased in number and reach over the past 15 months, sometimes greatly. Examples can be found everywhere, from major American metropolises to small Welsh towns. To be sure, the pandemic has not transformed the American economy into a 21st-century version of Spain's famed Mondragon (the worker cooperative founded by the Catholic priest José María Arizmendiarrietain in 1956 in accordance with the principle of solidarity, which has flourished and been much imitated ever since). Still, over the past year business advisory groups, scholars, and think tanks have more and more often embraced the local and the cooperative as crucial for charting a sustainable, post-pandemic path forward. Whether this burst of interest in mutualist economic alternatives will last remains to be seen--but at the very least, those who have long worked to build these alternatives ought to be feeling some gratification right now.

This shift hasn’t been solely the result of the pandemic, of course—more democratic and decentralized economic forms, and the arguments on behalf of such, have been achieving greater prominence for well over a decade now. This prominence has inspired some writers to look back, allowing those who have long been refining their communalist, mutualist, and cooperative alternatives a chance to make their case. Perhaps by studying these cases, and thereby adding to the foundation of this shift, we can strengthen it, or even encourage ourselves to get involved in these projects (or start our own!).  But if that strengthening is to happen, it will require, I think, a clear sense of what these alternatives are premised upon, and how those premises prevent them from falling into centralized, capitalist ruts.

But before premises, some particulars: what is meant by mutualism and cooperativism, and why should they be understood as standing distinct from the usual capitalist routines of our economy? The simplest answer is that any organization of economic activity that has woven egalitarian and communitarian practices into their daily operations—whether in terms of ownership, production, decision-making, pricing, wage scales, distribution, or anything else—is, to one degree or another, pursuing a path which gives place to something other than profit-maximization and consumer-individuation, and thus is departing from the ideal capitalist form. That doesn’t mean that profit and consumption never matter to communes or co-ops or credit unions or anything else crowd-sourced; the human desires and pressures that give rise to markets can’t ever, and shouldn’t ever, be ignored. And by the same token, it's not as though the capitalist form has ever existed anywhere solely as a pure ideal, without any concern for community or equality. The point to grasp is simply that mutualist economic alternatives emerge organically, democratically, as people confront the failures of the market and work out ways to change or improve or work around them. They are, by definition, works of compromise, though no less aspirational for all that.

Thus a “mutualist economic alternative” could be something as formal as a utopian commune, with people living and eating in the same buildings, satisfying their limited needs entirely through agrarian autarkic practices. Or it could be something as informal as a group of neighbors spread out over a few suburban blocks, who got to know each other through church or work or their kids' school, who all share a single lawnmower, rotated according to a vaguely defined schedule, with everyone filling it up with gas when they finish using it. The pandemic may not have provided us with many more of the former, but much evidence suggests that the past 15 months (or, for that matter, the past 13 years), we’ve been seeing more and more of the latter. (The economist Juliet Schor noted this slowly emerging transformation--which she called the shift towards "plenitude"--over a decade ago.)

The one thing this enormous range of local and collective actions have in common is that they are all, as the late Marxist scholar Erik Olin Wright thoughtfully labeled then, “interstitial.” Wright links together religious monasteries, labor unions, Amish farming villages, employee-owned businesses, mutual aid associations, and many more, presenting them as all part of the distinctly non-revolutionary project of “eroding” (not smashing--even the most convinced socialist probably knows that this is and must remain a historical dead end--but rather resisting and taming and dismantling and escaping) capitalism. “We can get on with the business of building a new world, not from the ashes of the old, but within the interstices of the old” (How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21^st Century [Verso, 2021], p. 63).

True, enlisting all co-ops, communes, credit unions and crowd-sourcing networks into a single “anti-capitalist” project is a harder sell for some than others. Consider two recent books, Nathan Schneider’s Everything for Everyone: The RadicalTradition That is Shaping the Next Economy and Sara Horowitz’s Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up. Both are excellent. They are also quite different, despite their shared, hopeful conviction that the “next economy” is going to be a more democratic, more social, more cooperative, and more mutual one, and despite essentially addressing a more or less identical range of alternative economic forms. Most importantly, though, they both show, in different ways, the difficulty, I think, of accepting the “project”-implications of what they describe.

Schneider’s book is the more comprehensive of the two. Published in 2018, Schneider explores the whole economic and social history of people forming cooperative associations to access markets, share information and resources, and strengthen their communities. The book is full of insightful observations, beginning with the dual inspiration of Elinor Ostrom’s important work on how communities manage “common-pool resources” (key point: borders and enforcement mechanisms are essential) and the Roman Catholic catechetical teaching of “the universal destination of goods” (which means, among other things, that “private property is an aberration, though under the conditions of fallen human society…a necessary arrangement”—pp. 20-21, 23-24). This mix of the practical and the moral is exactly what those thinking about communitarian alternatives need, and it shapes Schneider’s engagement with cooperative groups, businesses, and organizations both locally and internationally. In following examples from Kenya to Colorado, his awareness of the precariousness of communal alternatives—the way they require both “a supportive, nourishing culture from below and enabling policy from on high” (p. 14)—is a constant, and that’s valuable, encouraging stuff.

I wonder, though, about Schneider’s perspective on building cooperative alternatives to capitalism in today’s thoroughly globalized world. Given both his generation (he was born in the 1980s) and his vocation (he is a journalist and scholar of media studies), it is perhaps to be expected that Schneider would spend large part of his book discussing the (arguably entirely hypothetical) community-building potential of phone apps and crypto-currencies. While he is fully conscious of how “the lords of the cloud” will never allow the internet to become “an egalitarian commons of borderless, permissionless, peer-to-peer productivity,” he nonetheless appears ambivalent about attempts to reclaim the faded, real-world cooperative accomplishments (the grain elevators, the fisheries) of “sedentary peoples,” with he and his family instead being committed to “staying as nomadic as we can manage” (pp. 215-217). This is unfortunate, I think; it reflects a disengagement with place which leads Schneider to be more enamored of whatever he can designate as “half-socialist, half-libertarian”—really, anything that replaces government with “cooperative mechanisms” (pp. 185-188)—than perhaps he should be. The reality is that building sustainable alternatives must engage multiple levels of governance, taxation, and regulation—what he elsewhere wisely calls the “local, diverse, compromised legacies” of co-ops across the country and around the world—if they are going to have the social and economic power to maintain their ground. He is absolutely correct that “a generation gap divides the cooperative movement today” (pp. 232-233); it’s a gap that I think he recognizes his own place within, and one that I trust he will move out of, eventually.

Horowitz’s book similarly makes use of history to make an argument for cooperative alternatives that is both practical and moral, but the history she makes use of is intensely personal, something Schneider's writings could only invoke to a limited extent. Horowtiz’s frankly remarkable family history (her father was born in 1918, and worked closely his own father in building up union power for garment makers and others in pre-New Deal days) allows her a perspective on the possibilities for mutualism which is much needed in America today. Far from encompassing a wide range of communalist endeavors, Horowitz sees mutualism as most obviously something built by those looking to establish the conditions under which they work under industrial capitalism—in other words, through the building of unions. While her history makes use of Marx, Proudhon, Tocqueville, and many others, the heart of her historical argument never really strays far from the way Roosevelt’s New Deal, through legislation like the National Labor Relations Act, legitimated and empowered the associational efforts of people like her grandfather and father, only later to see that power taken away. As she somewhat rhapsodically describes those years:

[T]he success of Roosevelt’s top-down approach to social change via government programs created the sweeping national initiatives—the Civilian Conservation Corps, the orks Progress Administration, and so on—that we associate with the New Deal today….But I see another important element to the story. Roosevelt recognize the limits of what government could accomplish on its own….Rather than build new institutions from scratch, he looked at the ecosystem of mutualist organizations that already existed and realized that unions were the perfect tools to find workers where they already were….[The New Deal] would enshrine, protect, define, and bolster the labor movement, and in particular the strategy of industrial unionism. Whereas before…organized labor had been a diverse and idiosyncratic mutualist movement that was constantly experimenting….Roosevelt had in effect given unions a “job” in the post-New Deal economy. By putting a legal structure around the right to collectively bargain, Roosevelt had given unions a mandate--to bargain for higher wages--while also giving their economic model a regulatory backdrop….The New Deal created the business model that let unions thrive through the middle of the twentieth century (pp. 150-152).

Horowitz is not a labor historian, and there are many that might dispute the mutualist sympathies she sees embedded in that legislation. Still, her perspective--as the child and grandchild of labor organizers, she has an intimate understanding of the pre-political, associational, communal histories of diverse workers striving to carve out for themselves a place in late 19^th- and early 20^th-century industrial America--should be taken seriously. In fact her tale, and the way she extends it into such practical matters of raising capital and establishing revenue streams to support mutualist organizations, probably captures the point of Schneider’s observation about alternatives to capitalism requiring both a supportive culture below and enabling policy above better than any story he actually shared in his own book.

Like many others who succeed in building alternatives, though, Horowitz tends to see her particular alternative as a singular, necessary answer. A life-long contract worker, who founded the Freelancers Union and the Freelancers Insurance Company, she is quick to take decentralization to an extreme: “We live in a decentralized economy, and the next safety net will be no less decentralized” (p. 45). Her contempt for a Democratic party whose demographic base today is mostly disconnected from unionization and prefers national, redistributive solutions instead isn’t as great as her contempt for a Republican party which has consistently worked to undermine union power...but it is pretty great nonetheless. (Her story of how the FIC found itself discriminated against by President Obama's Affordable Care Act is one every reformer should read.) Her insistence that “[t]here’s no reason that proposals for nationalized health care can’t co-exist with mutualism, but mutualist organizations themselves—unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, faith communities—are uniquely position to be the delivery mechanism for that care” (p. 191) makes obvious sense…until one remembers that she is essentially describing Canadian Medicare with their Local Health Integration Networks, and now here come the (basically accurate, I would say) accusations of “socialism” again, which Horowitz insists--wrongly, I have to say--“couldn’t be more different” from her mutualist approach (p. 49). It would be interesting to know if Horowitz imagines a mutualist potential embedded in President Biden's American Rescue Plan Act, and if she doesn't, where exactly she thinks difference between Biden's ambitious and Roosevelt's actually lay.

These kinds of arguments--which really come down to what kind of "project" one is willing or unwilling to see one's alternative aspirations to encompass--all turn on the degree to which one understands these efforts in terms of people as opposed to ideas, and it is here where a return to Mondragon is helpful. Both Schneider and Horowitz dedicate part of their book to the aforementioned Mondragon Corporation, and it is worth considering its example as an important complement--and perhaps correction--to some of their insights. Father Arizmendiarrieta, universally known as “Arizmendi,” arrived in the Mondragon Valley of the Basque region of Spain in 1941 and began to teach, with an emphasis on vocational skills and cooperative techniques, with the aim of building up the collective wealth and the sense of solidarity within his community. When he established, along with five graduates of the school he’d established, the first Mondragon co-op, manufacturing paraffin burners, his goal was--and remains for the next 20 years, until his death in 1976--to change lives by changing, cooperatively and mutually, the economic conditions within which those lives were lived. "The interesting and key thing," he wrote, "is not the cooperatives, but the cooperators. Likewise, it is not democracy, but democrats. Not so much ideas as life experiences."

Since his death, Mondragon has expanded internationally, moving into multiple areas of manufacturing, retail, and finance, with its mutualist and cooperative principles mostly holding firm. For example, to enable to genuine mutual feeling between workers and managers, wage differences are tightly controlled, with the democratically chosen directors of different Mondragon cooperatives earning wages no greater than 9 times that of the lowest-paid worker in the firm, with the usual difference being held to 5-1. Unsurprising, many socialist thinker—including Wright—have seen this successful commercial venture, the seventh wealthiest company in Spain in terms of assets, as a vital anti-capitalist model for others as well.

Whether it is or not will be argued about for as long as the terms themselves are debated. But whatever its correct description, it is unfortunate that Arizmendi’s collected Reflections—the which are only now finally being made available in English thanks to a translation project spear-headed by Solidarity Hall—weren’t available to either of the authors discussed here, or so many others who strive to hold build communalist or mutualist or cooperative economic alternatives. (Though Schneider provides a forward to the Solidarity Hall publication.) Arizmendi and those who followed him have negotiated, experimented, tapped local resources, lobbied national parties, and appealed to international bodies; they have, in short, truly lived out Arizmendi’s profoundly pluralistic vision of cooperative empowerment. In the end, if the goal is worker empowerment, community solidarity, and Christian love, then focus first on the person, and who cares what ideological category such a personalist focus falls under? The radical possibilities of disparate alternatives which emerge over time and experimentation must not be disregarded just because they seem to challenge accepted patterns of economic behavior, whether left or right:

Our cooperatives must primarily serve those who wish them to be bulwarks of social justice, and not those who see cooperatives as refuges or safe spaces for their conservative inclinations….We cooperators have in our minds the idea that the future society will probably have to be pluralist in all aspects, including economics: the state and the private sector, the market and the planned economy, various entities, be they paternalistic, capitalist, or socialist, will be combined and coordinated. If we really believe in and love people, their freedom, justice and democracy, we will need to treat each situation, the nature of each activity, the level of evolution and development of each community, on the basis of an approach that is overarching but not exclusive (Arizmendi, Reflections, p. 100).

Popular discourse in the United States today—as well as in many places around the world—hasn’t been so open to alternatives to the liberal capitalist mainstream for close to a century. Partly this is a result of the economic catastrophes of recent years: the beginnings of the Great Recession 13 years ago, and of course the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic, beginning last spring. But it is also the result of political leaders who have been willing to forthrightly identify themselves with different forms and degrees of anti-capitalism, and even more so it is the result thousands of people--both those who have labored, locally and collectively, over decades to hold on to and to share the resources their communities and vocations and places have brought to them, as well as those who are attempting, for reasons of both curiosity and desperation, to rediscover these mutualist, communalist, and cooperativist possibilities today. Being clear on the levels involved in building and recovering such practices, and being willing to embrace their sometimes discomforting ideological plurality and breadth, will be essential for anyone who hopes, in the neighborhoods and churches and communities, to do their part. Schneider’s and Horowitz’s books provide some excellent perspective and guidance, and I strongly recommend them. But I also recommend contacting and learning from those who are doing this collective, cooperative work, whatever they may call it, wherever they may be. Whatever such hands-on learning involves and whatever ways it is described, Arizmendi would be proud.

Biden and (Some) Better Times for (Some of) Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

When President Joe Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan (ARP) a little more than a week ago, I commented to some friends that this may arguably turn to be one of the best things that has happened to Wichita in a very long time. Let me explain that argument here—starting with a rephrase of my original comment: the ARP will likely turn out to be one of the best things that has happened for many Wichitans in a very long time.

Why the change? In part because there are a thousand ways to think about a city, depending on the perspective of the person doing the thinking, and for every metric I or someone else might propose, someone else can surely come up with a different, countering one. While I don’t think that makes it impossible or inappropriate to talk in generalities about the common good (actually, I think it is both possible and necessary to do so), it does mean that I have to respect the perspective of tens of thousands of Wichitans, or more, who, for any number of reasons, hate (or at least have been told to hate, or hold to a political orientation which presumes—wrongly, I think—that they are supposed to hate) this latest stimulus.

Note however, that there are fewer such people than you might believe. While there were nearly 30,000 more people who voted for Donald Trump than for President Biden throughout Sedgwick County last November, leading the former president to win the county with 52% of the vote, that doesn’t hold for the city of Wichita itself, as this precinct-based graphic makes clear:

 

The city of Wichita isn’t entirely blue—not yet, anyway, and maybe not ever. But from Oaklawn to Bel Aire, the zoo to Eastborough, the default Republican preference of Kansans was challenged in our city, with a majority of voters throughout Wichita’s precincts going for Biden. Which means, if nothing else, that the passage of the American Rescue Plan is, for those voters, a huge confirmation of their political choice--a win, in other words. And not just a political win, obviously; nearly 100,000 households across Wichita are going to receive the $1400 per person stimulus checks (it would have been nearly 120,000 households, or easily 75% of the total population of the city, if moderate Democratic and Republican senators, including Wichita’s own two, hadn’t balked).

The Republicans of our city could push back at this point: the CARES Act which Trump pushed for did that too! True, but not to the same extent, and not as effectively. The ARP is actually giving more money to more people than did the CARES Act, which spent nearly three times as much money on businesses than on individuals and households. And while that money, mostly administered through the Paycheck Protection Program, was a lifesaver for some businesses, it was poorly administered, with comparatively little going to the employers that needed it most, thus having much less of an impact as it might have had, not to mention generating a lot of frustration and abuse along the way, as Wichita knows from plenty of local examples.

This can be debated, of course, as anything that involves hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars can be. Those who see the ARP as the second coming of the New Deal--whether hopefully or fearfully--should be prepared for disappointment; fundamentally, it’s really just another emergency stimulus package, first and last. It’s even possible that the CARES payment, when one really gets into the weeds, did more for working people than the ARP will. Now, if it works out that the additional child tax credits and increased unemployment and pension assistance which the ARP provides are made permanent—and the language of President Biden himself surely indicates that such is his intention—then that would retroactively turn the ARP into a genuinely transformative accomplishment, as much as Social Security or Medicare were. So if Wichita’s Republicans want to insist Biden didn’t do anything Trump didn’t already do, insofar as actual cash investments in the lives of struggling parents, workers, and retirees are concerned, the fairest answer may be: maybe; let’s wait and see.

But fortunately, there is an additional element to the ARP which we won’t have to wait a long time for, which demonstrates the true value of the act to Wichita’s development, and which involves something that the CARES Act barely touched upon: namely, direct aid to cities. Not just states (though they’ll getting plenty of support for all the programs they’re obliged to carry out too), but the municipal governments of "metropolitan cities," to use the actual language of the law. Wichita’s budget is facing estimated shortfalls of nearly $30 million over 2020-2021 thanks to the pandemic, with more likely to come in the future; the fact that the ARP will likely deliver close to $73 million to the city (according to the latest estimates) will make a massive difference in the costs which that revenue loss will mean to the quality of life in our city. 

(As an important aside, note that by setting up a program which bypasses states and counties, Wichita, and cities like it, may be able to avoid what looks likely to become a sticky constitutional and political fight, as some state leaders--including our own Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt--have argued that they ought to be able to use the ARP funds which will be given to states to cover new tax cuts, leaving the issue of making up for budget cuts to state programs aside. And that doesn't even touch the proposal by some Kansas legislators to grab up to $100 million of federal relief funds, presumably out of that which would be directed to Kansas counties, and use it to compensate businesses for their losses as punishment for the counties having imposed shut-down mandates as the governor directed. Wherever these destructive arguments go, they should touch that money directed to Wichita itself.)

I wrote “quality of life” up above purposefully. Thanks to the covid budget priorities the city council established last August, in which the Wichita Police Department enjoyed (in the midst of much protest and counter-protest) a large increase, the cuts which were introduced were overwhelming in the area of public arts, city libraries, capital improvements, parks and trees and sidewalks and bike paths and like. While clearly ARP funds will need to be used to first and foremost to support and supplement various localized covid-relief and anti-poverty measures (though honestly, given the distribution of responsibility between the city and the county, those should mostly come out of the $100 million or so which the Sedgwick County Commission will receive), if the spirit of this aid is adhered to by our city council at all (perhaps as encouraged by concerned citizens like you and me?) then we’ll see this important source of relief used to help begin to rejuvenate, and perhaps even re-direct, a city whose cultural offerings and music scene and patterns of growth (or lack thereof) have been taking major hits not just throughout the past year, but for quite a few years previously.

What is the “spirit of this aid” I mention? Simply the fact that the Biden administration, as it shaped and pushed for this relief package, had a set of priorities very different, and far more urban, than those of the Trump administration. The latter was happy to contribute to already deepening divisions in American society by tweeting at great length about “Democrat-run cities” with their “anarchist jurisdictions,” which is the sort of thing which leads Republican politicians like Kansas First District Representative Jake LaTurner to dismiss the whole thing as a scam to “bail out liberal states.” Those who are actually involved in administering cities, whether in red states or blue ones, know that is absolutely not true, and have said so at length. But the real story is buried within many and various ideas, plans, and people which Biden has brought with him to Washington.

While Trump’s re-election built itself in part upon distracting claims about how Biden’s crazed socialist ideas were going to destroy the (white) American suburban ideal, Biden’s campaign instead recognized that America’s suburban homeowner form houses a lot of racial and ethnic minorities, whose social and economic challenges required a response quite different from Trump’s culture war attacks. Biden’s push for more racial equity and low-income options among America’s suburban development goes hand-in-hand with lessening exclusive zoning requirements, encouraging greater density in development, and looking to expand transportations choices beyond just the well-subsidized suburban access roads and freeway on-ramps which have defined metropolitan sprawl for far too long, which in turn makes his nomination of Pete Buttigieg--a favorite of the Strong Towns movement!--as Secretary of Transportation potentially so important.

To be sure, you can legitimately criticize all of these supports as something that will actually undermine, rather than democratically empower, localities; I take all these criticisms seriously (even, to my surprise, the ones about zoning reform), and so should anyone else with genuinely localist and small-d democratic concerns about urban spaces in general. And yet, to see all of this happening in Washington, and underwritten at least in part by the ARP, at the same time that Wichita’s leaders are finally seriously talking about these related matters via their Places for People initiative, makes me wonder if there isn’t some kind of unforeseen alignment taking place. An alignment that will allow the different Wichita that is out there to take the support being offered it, and use it to build and encourage, in the midst of what is sure to be a long and difficult economic recovery, the kind of culturally-enriching, family-rewarding, individually-satisfying, community places and practices that Wichita has too-often sacrificed in the name of its usual, easily-fallen-back-into growth-centric routines.

It won’t come easily, of course, and it may not come at all. And if it does come, it won’t be a change that pleases the large number of Wichitans who look upon any push for greater urban sustainability, density, and equality in this city as antithetical to the small-town conservatism which they want to continue to imagine is appropriate for an urban area of a half-million people. That’s fair, I suppose. But I also suspect that, as a great many Wichitans emerge from what was probably, for the majority of us, one of the worst years of our lives, at least a few of us can see the possibility of some better—and even, maybe, differently better—times ahead. And even if not—well, 2021 can’t get any worse than last year, can it?

The Coronavirus in Kansas: Wichita's Weaknesses and Strengths

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, it's sometimes easy, here in Wichita--a large city nonetheless somewhat isolated and disconnected from the larger metropolitan areas of the country, a city which centers a largely rural and therefore much more low risk part of the state--to be unclear if we're overreacting or not reacting enough.But feeling as though we’re stuck in the middle, feeling divided, is nothing new for a mid-sized city like ours.

In general the news for Kansas overall seems to be pretty good. It is looking like the spread of the virus, as it peaks in April, won't be as deadly as we feared, almost certainly in part because of Governor Laura Kelly's (and locally, Sedgwick County Commissioner Lacey Cruse's) insistence on pushing for stay-at-home orders as early as possible. But is it true that, in taking these actions, Wichita will suffer even more than it would have had the city, and its surrounding county and state, not shut things down? Obviously you can find folks who self-righteously insist upon just that. The evidence suggests otherwise--but all the same, there's reason to worry. My best guess, on the basis of both observations and ongoing research, is that Wichita, and most of our state generally, will be able to weather this month, and the next, relatively well--but that rebuilding afterwards may be confronted with some real difficulties.

On the positive side, comparative data provided by Wichita State University shows that, as Kansas’s economy is generally much less dependent upon service, entertainment, and tourist sectors than is the case elsewhere, we haven’t seen quite the same level of job losses and business closures statewide. The mainstays of Kansas’s economy–food production, manufacturing, education, and health care–are broadly considered essential, and thus have mostly been able to continue to operate.

That’s no comfort, of course, to the many Kansans who are suddenly facing unemployment and real economic distress. Nor does it lessen the fear which so many of us have here about the possible loss of so much that adds to the quality of life here in Wichita–the restaurants, the theaters, the bookstores, the "third places," and so much more. And that is what puts a question mark beside this otherwise good news for the folks in this city--Wichita is actually enough of a metropolitan economy that it does, in fact, include significant service and entertainment sectors. Not nearly what New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago or even Kansas City has, of course, but still, enough that, as the Wichita State study shows, a few of the negative economic effects (like regarding air travel) which are below the national average for Kansas, are slightly above it for Wichita. Not much, but slightly. This is why it is vital for Wichita to take seriously questions about how to keep money in the pockets of as many Wichitans as possible (providing maternity leave for city workers whose vacation and sick leave are being used to help support their fellow furloughed workers is one good idea) that probably aren't even on the radar screen in many smaller cities. Small actions, such are withing the jurisdiction of the mayor and the city council, may make all the difference in enabling Wichitans to enjoy the same lower level of economic pain and disruption which will likely characterize the rest of the state for the duration of the pandemic.

Something similar might be said regarding psychological pain and family disruption. Nowhere in Kansas--and certainly not even here in Wichita, the largest single city in the state--do we see the kind of urban density which characterizes those cities that have seen the largest outbreaks, and thus have had to take the most extreme actions for the sake of public health. But even if such measures become necessary here--and again, given the success that we've had in flattening the curve they hopefully will not be--they still wouldn’t play out the same way that they have in larger urban agglomerations. Simply put, Kansans--and Wichitans too--generally have easy access to rural space. When it comes to mental health and minimizing domestic conflict, that matters. As one writer suggested in The New York Times, social distancing in an environment when families have gardens, fields, and locally grown food readily available to them, is a very different prospect from social distancing when three people in a cramped downtown apartment have to maintain 6 ft. distance from one another, and when even the parks and sidewalks are often so crowded with people trying to find some openness that they become sources of stress and have to be subject to further regulation.

In a way, it might be Wichita's very in-betweeness which will make this city a real model insofar as such matters are concerned. We have a genuinely large population with a low enough level of density that nearly all of its residents can take advantage of rural space for physical and mental rejuvenation relatively easily. That's not to say that there aren't problems which some Wichitans could face in this regard; one may think of transportation and access to some of that (mostly privately owned, and sometimes fiercely patrolled) open space, particularly for poorer Wichitans in the downtown and southern parts of the city. And of course, the safety and maintenance of the trails and bike paths and road shoulders by which we can make use of that space once we get there is a question as well. As city leaders take a look of where to cut costs in the face of the financial hit the city is taking, and will continue to take, one hopes they're recognize that is, also, is part of the value and resilience of the city, and will attend to the costs of those easily overlooked resources accordingly.

Still, in general, it would be fair to conclude that Wichita, and south-central Kansas overall, has available to it the opportunities and the resources keep the economic damage and the social consequences of the pandemic minimal. But that, unfortunately, is not the whole story. We have to think about long-term impacts, and not just short-term ones.

As the same Wichita State study warns, food production and manufacturing in Kansas is heavily dependent upon supply chains in equipment and trade that the overall economic health of the nation effectively determines. Service workers and others who work in more creative or information-dependent sectors of the economy can snap back as soon as paying customers return; the same cannot be said for larger industries that need to wait for raw materials to ship or are dependent upon extended networks of specialized workers. The fact that Wichita, as mentioned above, actually does have a decent-sized service sector, will mean that, as the larger mainstays of Kansas's economy slowly struggle back to life, it may be the collective action of activists, entrepreneurs, and urban creatives in our city that will be end up being essential to whatever support will be needed for workers in the aircraft industry and others in the meantime. Of course, given how much of Wichita's workforce is tied up in heavy manufacturing, which over the past year has already taken many 737 Max-related hits, maybe the best we can hope for is a wash.

Agriculture may be another problem. True, the likelihood of the virus spreading widely in isolated Kansas farming towns is quite small. But as the work force in Kansas’s rural counties is also quite small, and as many of those counties–thanks to Republican opposition to extending Medicaid—lack basic health care resources, even a small outbreak could be devastating. The resulting could be a domino effect, with unproductive or failed farms and feedlots forcing closures in ancillary food industries across the state, many of which are concentrated in south-central Kansas, with Wichita as their hub. Ultimately we may see a hastening of the already underway rural population collapse in western Kansas, with long-term social, economic, and political consequences for our city, as more and more people throughout the region come to Wichita seeking medical care and basic economic opportunities, contributing our aging population and probably not adding much to the overall tax base. It's a good thing that Sedgwick County's population is just over the half-million mark, thereby qualifying it for at least a slice of the $150 billion the federal government has earmarked to help out state, county, and municipal governments; in the months to follow this pandemic, with so many liabilities building up and so much potential revenue off the table, it's going to need it.

As we wait to see what this plague brings into our lives, our task as Wichitans must be to use the resources we have–a large population, one which is likely to find ways to remain relatively stable, socially and economically, in the short-term–to reach out and help make more resilient those places likely to struggle the most as Kansas recovers from this pandemic, whenever that recovery fully comes.

The Wonderfully (if Perhaps Insufficiently) Radical Bill McKibben

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

I've been a fan of Bill McKibben's writings for close to 30 years. That doesn't mean I've agreed with, or even enjoyed, everything this endlessly prolific journalist-environmentalist-activist-pundit-essayist has produced over the decades (he's had at least a couple of complete misses, in my opinion). But when, back in April, I heard he was returning to Wichita, KS, to promote his latest book, Falter: Has the Human Game Finally Begun to Play Itself Out? at one of our delightful local bookstores, Watermark Books & Cafe, I knew it was a presentation I couldn't miss. Though Falter, and the case McKibben made both for and in that book, isn't one I'm likely to be madly repeating or repeatedly recommending to my students or others, I'm glad I was there.

Like plenty of folks who recognize--whether for reasons scientific or spiritual or social or all three--the environmentally and culturally destructive consequences of modernity's relentless insistence upon economic and technological expansion, my relationship with McKibben's (usually) thoughtful writing began with The End of Nature, his short and, I think, profoundly eye-opening extended essay from 30 years ago. Long before anyone, so far as I know, was using terms like "the Anthropocene," McKibben was presciently leading his readers--like myself, an early 90s college student, someone with little scientific knowledge and only a small sense of how important terms like "community" and "sustainability" would eventually become in my life--through an argument about how the post-WWII human impact upon the climate, the oceans, and the soil, is both greater and more lasting than any previous human intervention. It was, and remains, a beautiful book: "When I say that we have ended nature, I don't mean, obviously, that natural processes have ceased--there is still sunshine and still wind, still growth, still decay. Photosynthesis continues, as does respiration. But we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us--its separation from human society" (The End of Nature, Anchor Books, 2nd ed. [1999], p. 64). The hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere, the hundreds of millions of tons of industrial fertilizer we have put into our farmlands and watersheds: all of it was then warping, and today continues to warp, ecological processes which had evolved over billions of years in a direction reflective of humanity's most short-term and utilitarian preferences. And as for the better human interactions with those natural processes--practices which had been able, in a less expansive and technological era, to become (to quote Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson) "native to their place"? They were being warped, being made crude short-term and technological, too.

Someone familiar with these arguments as they have played out over the decades might notice an imperfect fit here, and they wouldn't be wrong. McKibben and Berry and Jackson all recognize each other has compatriots in the effort to articulate a more sustainable and local way of life, one that is disconnected from the rat race of endless growth and change. Their mutual admiration is well documented. And yet, the place (both geographically and metaphorically) that McKibben is native to is one very different from the agricultural environs and mentality which grounds the reflections of thinkers like Berry and Jackson. McKibben is a Vermont writer, a mountain-climber and a cross-country skier, an organizer of protests across the nation and reporting expeditions around the globe; his adoration for, and his mourning for, nature is grounded not in husbandry but in observation. That is, of course, one of the reasons he has the readership he has: he can take his readers, as he does in Falter, from Alberta's tar sands to Greenland's melting glaciers to the accidentally protected (thanks to the land claimed by Kennedy Space Center) sand dunes along the Florida coast and take it in as a reporter, an admirer, a visitor--which is, of course, all the most of us will ever be.

I don't put this forward as a criticism, but rather as a way of appreciating what McKibben has accomplished with his activism and arguments, while also noting what he, perhaps, can only occasionally authentically grasp. Falter is a fine book, with typically lyrical writing and sharp observations. In my judgment, though, it stumbles occasionally. Much of the anticipation over the book was due to it presenting itself, in part, as an update to The End of Nature, a reflection on the gains and losses of the argument which McKibben, as much as anyone, started 30 years ago. McKibben does not disappoint on this score: the first section of the book, "The Size of the Board," is unsparing (and sometimes uncomfortably earnest) in its description of the complex, entwined environmental, economic, and political crises which rising ocean temperatures, increasing weather extremes, and local ecosystem collapses present us with in 2019. But in the middle portion of the book, McKibben's thoughts lead him in different directions.

First, he takes us through a long polemic against the Koch brothers and a handful of other oil company executives, libertarian economists, and Republican politician whom he holds all but solely responsible for the relative lack of action on climate change over the past 30 years. (I have no problem with the targets he's chosen, but am less than thrilled by the simplistic--and sometimes unsupportable*--ways in which assumes that choices by big money actors automatically control all electoral contests.) Next, he turns to a fascinating excursion through genetic engineering, transhumanism, and other obsessions of the Silicon Valley elite. This is great stuff--and includes many arguments that, in a world with a fierce and well-funded race to perfect in vitro, gene splicing, and AI technologies, deserve a more thorough theoretical unpacking. How it all connects to the "faltering" of the human game is, unfortunately, only inconsistently made clear.

What McKibben needs--and, to be fair, the book's wonderful concluding section, "An Outside Chance," occasionally provides it--is a strong argument about what human being is. Nature and wildness, community and connection, and a sense of both physical and temporal space (and hence an acknowledgement of the limits inherent to such)--all are necessary components of a flourishing human existence; that his writing makes, in my view, a strongly persuasive case for. But how to tie it together, such that it makes sense to say that, in the face of all of the above, the "human game" is "playing itself out"? That's a deeper theoretical project, one that McKibben, an inveterate observer and experimenter and writer, perhaps can only gesture towards. That's no small thing, to be sure--and when your gestures are as striking and thoughtful as McKibben's often are, then his valued role as a much-needed seeder and agitator of ideas is assured.

Two gestures--just random implications that struck me as I worked through his thoughtful sentences--of McKibben's stand out most particularly to me. One has to do with technology; the second has to do with scale. The first is rooted in "obsolescence," and how that fact is reflected in both our destructive (and only partly unknowing) efforts to transform the planet into a simple source of energy extraction, and in the modern obsession with technological and genetic improvement. In both cases, we can see, at bottom, the desire to make other people, other things, and even ourselves and our immediate environs, into things that can be controlled, used, reliably replicated...and then, presumably, disposed of.

Current humans have changed so little over the millennia that, say, Stonehenge still makes us feel something. It was created by creatures genetically very much like us, creatures who processed dopamine the same way we do. They are much more like us than our grandchildren would be, should be go down [the designer baby] path. But those modified grandchildren will also no longer be really related to their future....When we engineer and design, we turn people into a form of technology, and obsolescence is an utterly predictable feature of every technology we've ever seen...The randomnness of our current genetic inheritance allows each of us a certain mental freedom from determinism, but that freedom disappears the day we understand ourselves [or, I would add, our natural environment] to be, in essence, a product (pp. 170-172).

McKibben, perhaps to his discredit, has never really been any kind of Luddite; he recognizes the arguments against invasive technologies, but he's always liked his doo-dads and toys. Still, here he has stumbled upon something important--the fact that there is a freedom which is lost when one puts one's lifestyle, or indeed one's very life, on the technological treadmill. The freedom I'm talking about is one that McKibben, good liberal Methodist that he is, would quickly recognize: the freedom of knowing, and disciplining oneself to, the truths of creation, and finding an open-ended space of meaningful action therein. To get off that treadmill, and save that freedom, one could see McKibben as calling for, shall we say, "counter-technologies." He focuses on the possibility of solar energy (the cost and capacities of which are improving every year) to liberate us from corporate energy dominance, and non-violent resistant (such as McKibben, through his organization 350.org, has been able to use, sometimes even successfully) to liberate us from corporate financial and political dominance. An odd duo, to be sure. But in the language of his reflections, their potential to free us from looming disposability, from the sense of the "inevitability" of the warped systems around us which Wendell Berry has rightly condemned, make sense: "Solar energy and nonviolence are technologies less of expansion than of repair, less of growth than of consolidation, less of disruption than of healing. They posit that we've grown powerful enough as a species, and that the job now is to make sure that that power is shared and controlled" (p. 226).

To gesture towards humankind as a species that has "grown powerful enough" is to bring us to his other vital, if insufficiently explored, idea, and that is scale. (Though to be fair, McKibben has written a whole book which revolves around the subject before--it's his best book, I think, one that I've used often.) Obsolescence--and the short-cuts, expediencies, and conveniences which it is the inevitable end point of--often feels forced upon us by the systems and expectations that we can't imagine managing a complex society without. That is not a flawed observation; complexity does produce its own relentless logics. So perhaps what we most need is to simplify, to retreat from connections that suck our paychecks, educational goals, military obligations, and most of all our hearts and minds, into the cult of Big and More:

If the only things you wanted in the world were efficiency and growth, then you'd scale things up--and we have: large corporations, large nations. But we've reached the point where size hinders as much as it helps, where it reduces the many ways the human game might be played down to just a few....[B]oth nonviolence and solar panels nudge us, at least a little, toward a smaller-scale world less obsessed with efficiency....We'll have to fight to make sure this happens--that communities control their local energy sources, and that those sources are developed with everyone's interests in mind--but at least it's a possibility. Home, community, is the ground on which we can actually play the human game, and it is a false efficiency to undermine it....There a time and a place for growth, and a time and a place for maturity, for balance, for scale (pp. 231-233).

The problem which McKibben has been struggling with, on and off, for more than three decades is unlike any that we know of any human society having had to struggle with before. It is a problem rooted in our own perceptions, and the way our technologies and economies have (both metaphorically and literally) warped and shrunk our planet and its organic, created rhythms so thoroughly that we often can neither perceive or even perhaps conceive of what we have lost. No loss is total, of course; McKibben knows that (and, more over, knows that selling the apocalypse is the shortest short-term strategy of all). But just because nature--of some sort--continues, and human life--or some definition thereof--keeps on stumbling forward, doesn't mean we shouldn't pay close attention to what harms and losses we're experiencing along the way. Whatever confusion or frustration or limitations attend McKibben's writing, he's always helped me see thing worth seeing, and think things worth thinking. And I'm not alone in thinking that way--Wichita, KS, is hardly a haven for environmentalist, localist, anti-capitalist, small-c conservative thought, but his presence at Watermark brought the whole gang of us out; my only regret was that it was the end of the semester, and I couldn't bring any students out to meet him. Fortunately, he'll be back in Kansas next September, speaking at The Land Institute (under Wes Jackson's kindly eye, no less!). I'll be there, students in tow, hoping they, like me 30 years ago, will hear or read something that, even if they don't fully agree with or appreciate it, will get them to think and see differently.

*For the problems with McKibben's reliance upon Nancy MacLean's screed against James Buchanan, public choice theory, and the supposed secret libertarian plot to destroy democracy, see here, here, and here.

Bringing Wendell Berry (and Business) to Sterling

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

A week ago I was able to organize a small group of friends to attend a fine, relatively intimate event at Sterling College, a small Christian liberal arts college in Kansas (much like my own). The event, titled "Virtues of Place: Wendell Berry and Rural Kansas" was really two events, but I just want to talk about the first, a panel discussion with Front Porch Republic's website guru Jeff Bilbro and his friend and colleague Jack Baker--who have together written a fine book on education and Berry's thought--along with Aubrey Streit Krug, the Director of Ecosphere Studies at The Land Institute in Salina, KS. Many ideas came up in that discussion; let me focus on one of them.

The panel was a guided discussion about what it means to pursue "placeness"--that is, to develop a truly sustainable attachment to and affection for the social, economic, and culture characteristics of where one lives, works, and builds one's family or community--in small rural towns, where the extractive farming economy of the past half-century has led to consolidation and de-population in equal measure. While the panelists had thoughtful things to say about the sorts of narratives we need to share to prioritize the value of finding worth in one's own situation, rather than always seeking another, they never could entirely extract themselves from the economic. After all, it is one thing to hold to Wendell Berry's call to be a "sticker," to learn to inhabit and love one's own place, as he laid it out in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, when one's place is sufficiently connected or culturally rich  or filled with employment opportunities, so as be able to withstand the effects which distant corporate or governmental centralization might have on one's livelihood. But what about Sterling? A population of a little over 2000, a median income below both the American and the Kansas average, a poor farming town, with the only non-agricultural employer of any size (besides Sterling College itself) being Jacam Chemical, a chemical manufacturer which started in Sterling in 1982 but relocated its headquarters to the comparative metropolis of Wichita (metro area population: 645,000), more than an hour away, decades ago? What can Berry's ideas teach to such a community about sustainability?

Jeff was pretty frank in his comments, when pushed to the point. As important as reframing our understanding of place may be--especially for young people and college students!--it is admittedly simply difficult to think about the virtues of place in Sterling, or thousands of other small rural communities spread across the country, when the very real financial constraints which the people who want to live in such places confront on a daily basis are not being addressed. (The fact that the heartfelt efforts of numerous rural Republicans and Democrats across the state to once again attempt to get the Republican leadership in Topeka to allow a vote of Medicaid expansion, which medical workers and a hospital administrators in Kansas are nearly unanimous in praying for as the best option for keeping health care available in isolated, rural communities like Sterling, went down once more to defeat the same week as this symposium, probably should have received some comment, but it didn't.) Jeff emphasized that he didn't think at all that material variables were the only or even the most important ones when it comes to being able to build attachments to a place--but they probably are, at the very least, necessary ones.

In thinking about that necessary work, I couldn't help but think about a former student of mine who came up to Sterling with us: Nick Pohlenz, a man who has studied theology and philosophy and how to brew beer, and now makes his living running a sawmill. I had him come to speak to one of my classes once about his experiences, and on the drive from Wichita to Sterling, he talked about what his own work--specifically, strengthening his small mill's ability to productively reach into those regional niches where the sort of wood they can most profitably cut and process (black walnut in particular) is available in batches which they can buy, transport, and handle--can provide to a small town like Sterling. Black walnut, and regional trees like Osage orange trees and the like, are primarily found in river bottoms or other low-lying areas--areas which many farmers, seeking to level their land so as to take advantage of the economies of scale which industrial agriculture presumes, will often plow under, burn out, or just cut and leave in massive brush piles. Major milling operations, looking to sell lumber to China or other distant locales, will be quick to spot large stands of such timber, and major farming operations will similarly be quick to calculate into their offers to buy up neighboring farms such possible profits. But what about small or mid-sized farms, particularly those owned by families or individuals that would really rather hold on to their parents' or grandparents' or great-grandparents' farm, even if they have to work other jobs in the area (or commute all the way to nearest city of any size) to supplement their income sufficient to pay the bills? To paraphrase, as close as I can remember, Nick's comment as we drove into Sterling:

"Over the past couple of years, this has become a crucial win-win for us: to come into these small rural farming [or, I would add, post-farming] communities, and get to the local landowners, and offer to buy and clear out a small stand of timber on their property. If we're just talking about a typical isolated patch in a bottom area, we'd only be looking at a few thousand dollars. A big farming operation wouldn't bother listening to us; to them, $3000 is an insurance payment on their combine. They'll just plow it under. But how often do you think some of these local landowners have seen a couple of thousand dollars? Not often enough! They'll take it, and we'll take the wood, which will be more than enough to us to mill or woodwork enough product to satisfy our local clientele for some time. Bringing our business to these small towns is essential to our whole operation."

To think both practically as well as politically about what Nick's experience with Elderslie Woodworks suggests, I think we can see several factors at work. America's small farming towns and the food producers that try to keep them functioning, to ever escape total domination (and thus, probably, eventually, total automation), need small-scale enterprises that can productively bring wealth into their places. The businesses must be small-scaled for a very practical reason: those businesses which are scaled to take advantage of the global flows of capital which exist today simply won't be able to profitably approach locaql operators who prefer to resist large-scale transformations--like, say, refusing to simply sell or consolidate their whole 40 acre or 400 acre plot. (Interestingly, one critical voice at the panel discussion was a local farmer who proudly defended her ability to be able to run a successful 4000-acre soybean operation, without, to her mind, any of the "placelessness" which the panel was addressing. It's fair to hear her challenges, of course--but it's also worth asking her, and thousands of other farmers who have accepted the gospel of "get big or get out" for decades, why she felt it so important to insist that we have "progressed" beyond the supposedly dangerous dream of a financially viable farm operating on a mere 50-acre plot.)

There is also a political reality here as well--defending mid-sized regional cities, ones large enough to develop enough specialized wealth so as to make local artisan work actually profitable, but also not so large as to crowd out the ability of small businesses to fit within their operating expenses outreach to and work within the small communities that exist within the regional cities orbit. True, certain sorts of small businesses have been able to maintain ties with small rural towns and the resources they offer even in the midst of huge urban agglomerations--but not many, and even fewer that actually make use of what those small rural towns can offer from out of their natural resources. And that, of course, takes us back to the whole theme of the symposium. For as the second event of the day, an evening presentation by Jeff and Jack about their argument for rethinking the university along the lines of "place-ness," made very clear: however specialized or abstract any of our work or our thinking may become, there is simply no superior alternative for building up the virtue of affection for a way and a place of life than involving oneself in the ground one walks upon: farming it, planting gardens in it, recognizing its needs and enjoying its health.

It is an interesting reality that in a market economy that has moved beyond mere subsistence, it may well be that continuing to make possible the rural small town depends upon those small towns being in a relationship with a wealth generating urban center. But then, perhaps it has always been that way? Perhaps the idea that the rural farmland wasn't a relational (and thus somewhat restricting) necessity to local urban space, but rather was purely a natural (and thus extractable) resource that any urban place--the bigger the better!--anywhere in the world could make use was just an aberrant thought, one which global capitalism and cheap oil made us believe? Well, however one construes it, keeping in mind that rebuilding a sense of place will probably also mean rebuilding a sense of mutual obligation between different types of places is an important lesson, I think. I am grateful for Sterling College and my friends for helping me to see it this week.