Thoughts on MacIntyre

Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers, theologians, and political theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was, like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other thinker I linked to above.

For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign, rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health. By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding, interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid today.

Of course, today it is the postliberals who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves. As bizarre that MacIntyre himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred Dallmayr—who, as I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a chapter from his book Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,” nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,” thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.*

But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can take us in an interesting direction.

In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time (maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically universal:

But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with characteristically modern views of rationality (p. 123).

Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted beings, and thus mostly think, and judge, by and through those institutions and histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to stories—is language, and the structural forms by which language is conveyed. On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the social bonds and interactions which define us.

The complaint about linguistic communities is, of course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change. MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).

That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which another story cannot.

It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions, he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:

The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!], in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).

It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade. Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear, fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat in pace, sir.

*Update, 5/27/2025: Noah Millman’s tribute to MacIntyre is really superb, and in talking about his piece with our mutual friend Damon Linker, Damon made an observation which clarifies what I was gesturing at in this paragraph very well: “In the end, though, I’m not a MacIntyre admirer. I get my Aristotle from Strauss. And the problem Noah notes early on in his piece — of MacIntyre projecting Aristotelian theory onto the lived reality of the ancient and medieval worlds — is a big problem and the ultimate source of the influence he had on the ‘postliberal’ right. This influence made MacIntyre uncomfortable, but it was his own fault for eliding crucial distinctions in a way that made it sound like he was describing a lost world of moral wholeness and meaning that was banished by the Enlightenment, etc. That’s garden-variety reactionary romanticism, and it’s unfortunate MacIntyre gave it fuel.”

Blame Christmas

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Towards the end W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, written 80 years ago, Auden gives an imaginative narrative voice to a marvelously contemporary and thoroughly professional Herod the Great, the man responsible for the Massacre of the Innocents, at least according to Matthew 2:16-18. The Herod of Auden’s prose-poem is a hard-working, highly intelligent, rigorously sensible man, someone wise enough not to imagine that he knows everything, but grounded enough to be confident in the consequences of even that which he does not know. The story of Jesus, he realizes, whether or not it is true, must be stopped immediately, because the masses of people in the world are delicate, desperate, and often deplorable, and in need of the disciplining, dependable myths which are central to the religious and civic order. Allow them to start thinking about God’s relationship to humanity as a personal Gift, as an expression of divine Love, as fundamentally a Mystery, and madness will reign. In imagining Herod in this way, Auden was perhaps updating, and making more relatable, the equally hard-working, highly intelligent, and rigorously sensible Grand Inquisitor of Fyodor Dostoevsky, but honestly, this man is a figure well-known to many of us, and sometimes--especially for people like me who take traditions seriously enough to think they are worth arguing about--maybe is us as well.

Auden’s Herod wasn’t fundamentally wrong: Christmas actually is a Surprise (and a Liberal one too, in its most topsy-turvy and transformative, not its most cramped and Clintonite, sense: the line from the Lords of Misrule to Scrooge dancing and laughing after his--literally--Spiritual experiences to Drag Queen Christmases is pretty obvious, I think). The surprising (and sometimes even harsh) mysteries of forgiveness and liberality and equality and grace completely defined Jesus’s mortal life, at least so far as the Gospels tell us, from beginning to end. So Herod got that right; he just was wrong in thinking that such Surprises, if they are not Explained and Made Accountable and Properly Directed, are a bad thing. They are, on the contrary, as challenging as they can be to those of us with even a little small-c conservative sensibility, the best things possible. So in the spirit of that grace, and of those best things, let's pass the mic for a moment respectfully to those hard-working, highly intelligent, rigorously sensible, and sadly wrong folk who blame Christmas (even without realizing it) for the madness of our world, and will keep on doing so, right up until the moment when God saves their souls, and ours, at the very end.

FOR THE TIME BEING

The Massacre of the Innocents

I. Herod

...Judging by the trio who came to see me this morning with an ecstatic grin on their scholarly faces, the job has been done. “God has been born,” they cried, “we have seen him ourselves. The World is saved. Nothing else matters.”

One needn't be much of a psychologist to realise that if this rumour is not stamped out now, in a few years it is capable of diseasing the whole Empire, and one doesn't have to be a prophet to predict the consequences if it should.

Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, and the same for all, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions--feelings in the solar plexus induced by undernourishment, angelic images generated by fevers or drugs, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of school children ranked above the greatest masterpieces.

Idealism will be replaced by Materialism....Diverted from its normal and wholesome outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the materialistic Masses for some visible ldol to worship will be driven into totally unsocial channels where no education can reach it. Divine honours will be paid to silver tea-pots, shallow depressions in the earth, names on maps, domestic pets, ruined windmills, even in extreme cases, which will become increasingly common, to headaches, or malignant tumors, or four o'clock in the afternoon.

Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: “I'm such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.” Every crook will argue: “I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.” And the ambition of every young cop will be to secure a death-bed repentance. The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen. Civilisation must be saved even if this means sending for the military as I suppose it does. How dreary. Why is it that in the end civilisation always has to call in these professional tidiers to whom it is all one whether it be Pythagoras or a homicidal lunatic that they are instructed to exterminate? O dear, why couldn't this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can't people be sensible? I don't want to be horrid. Why can't they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd? Because it is. And suppose, just for the sake of argument, that it isn't, that this story is true, that this child is in some inexplicable manner both God and Man, that he grows up, lives, and dies, without committing a single sin? Would that make life any better? On the contrary it would make it far, far worse. For it can only mean this: that once having shown them how, God would expect every man, whatever his fortune, to lead a sinless life in the flesh and on earth. Then indeed would the human race be plunged into madness and despair. And for me personally at this moment it would mean that God had given me the power to destroy Himself. I refuse to be taken in, He could not play such a horrible practical joke. Why should He dislike me so? I've worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I've taken elocution lessons. I've hardly ever taken bribes. How dare He allow me to decide? I've tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. I haven't had sex for a month. I object. I'm a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born.

Diversity, Race, and Radical Hospitality in a Bible-based Community

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]  

A month ago, on May 16, just two days after a racist lunatic murdered 10 black Americans in Buffalo, NY, perhaps 100 academics and educators, mostly from other Christian universities (including my own school of Friends University in Wichita), gathered at Sterling College in Kansas to learn about and discuss "Fostering Community and Hospitality on a Diverse Campus," which turned out to be overwhelmingly focused on the problems of race. This is the second time the tiny Christian college of Sterling had hosted a conference which struggled with big ideas, and like the last time, I came away filled with challenging thoughts. Let me share a couple of them here.

The first impression I had as the conference got underway was surprise. Sterling is a small, conservative, racially homogeneous Kansas town (over 90% of the 2600 people who live there identify as white), and that surely shaped my expectations. That this residential college organized a conference which presented, as its very first event, a powerful plenary address by Richard Hughes, scholar-in-residence at Lipscomb University, titled "Escaping the Grip of White Supremacy: A Mandate for Christian Higher Education," meant that I and the other participants were going to be made part of something much more theologically and politically challenging than discussions of diversity efforts in athletic recruitment (though that took place as well). Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised; the student population of Sterling College itself is over 25% non-white, and in that rural environment, it might be sensible to make responding to racial inequities, animosities, and misunderstandings, real or perceived, an absolute priority. 

Still, the conference's unapologetic focus on racism and aggressively attacking the obstacles which prevent the full inclusion of those of a different race by the white majority which generally characterizes small Christian colleges in the United States, from the opening address to the concluding Q&A, was striking. While there was some discussion of interfaith dialogue and religious diversity on a thoroughly Protestant Christian campus like Sterling, and some references to LGBTQ issues and sexual minorities as well, they were clearly a minor theme, almost certainly purposefully so. One of my colleagues who attended with me suggested that the conference should have been titled "Fostering Community and Racial Hospitality" for the sake of truth in advertising.

But perhaps that focus is also logical, for a college deeply committed to forming a community that has at least some element of the Biblical message at its core? There are plenty of examples of folks trying, with varying degrees of success, to extend the Christian message of welcoming the stranger, showing compassion to the foreigner, and loving those who are despised, to the whole range of identities which face hostility, exclusion, or oppression in the world today, whether in matters of language or sexuality or politics or legal status or physical capability. I don't think any of those, however, can be as thoroughly grounded in such Christian teachings as all humanity being created in the image of God, or being commanded to spread the Good News to all nationalities, or being instructed that God's love is incompatible with favoritism and demands equality, as the condemnation of any kind of racism can be. So when Hughes asserted that it is the special responsibility of Christian colleges and universities to correct for the historical "erasure of the story of blackness from American life," and to "tell the stories of blackness as part of the diversity within the Kingdom of God," he surely felt himself on very firm scriptural ground.

If you're thinking that Hughes, with his insistence that Christian hospitality makes it necessarily for those who hold to Jesus's gospel to prioritize the stories of the racially oppressed, was essentially calling for Christian colleges to embrace progressive causes like Black Likes Matter, reparations for slavery, or the 1619 Project, you're almost certainly correct (though they were only mentioned in passing in his heavily theological address). In fact, you should go even further than that. Hughes actually reached all the way back to 2008, and gave an explicit defense of the Reverent Jeremiah Wright, quoting from the same controversial sermons which led then-candidate Barack Obama to distance himself from the man who had been the pastor of him and his family for over 15 years. Hughes called our attention to the enormous, murderous evils which slavery, Jim Crow, and the legacy of discrimination in all its forms have visited upon people of African descent throughout American history, and picking up on Wright's use of the rhetoric of civil religion, asked the American Christians in the audience if they wish to build communities that hold at their center that Kingdom of God which insists, in his words, on "turning the world upside-down," or whether they would continue with assuming that the social, economic, and legal world delivered to white Christians in America was set up in the right way? If the latter, than we need to feel the force of Wright's sermon "Confusing God and Government"--which climaxes in a condemnation, Hughes noted, grounded in the Second Commandment: God damn America for making herself into an idol, for acting "like she is God and she is supreme."

Our group from Friends University lucked out at lunch during the one-day conference, and were able to sit and speak directly with Hughes and the other plenary speaker, Nathan Luis Cartagena, a Puerto Rican professor of philosophy at Wheaton College, whose afternoon address, "Cultivating Mercy on a Diverse Campus," drew heavily upon liberation  theology and thoughtfully unpacked what he called "weaponized visions" of distinctly un-Christian "mercy." So yes, the conference--whether through the plenary addresses or the break-out sessions on the theology of hospitality and more--had a much broader aspirations than I think any of us expected.

And that breadth, focused as it was on matters of race and the Christian message, makes up the second major impression I took away from the conference. Despite the deadly rampage which had taken place less than 48 hours before the conference began and filled the news (and which, tragically, was quickly joined by stories of multiple, other mass shootings), I think I heard only a single, brief reference to Buffalo and Payton Gendron all day. The attempt of the conference presenters to capture the challenges and obstacles facing small Christian college which desire to be racially inclusive in their policies, in other words, never really looked at the problem in terms of solitary actors, racist trouble-makers, or bad apples. The analysis offered by different speakers--which included scriptural, pedagogical, historical, and theological approaches--was with the systems, presumptions, and structural forces which surround us, whether we're talking about balancing respect for students with campus law enforcement needs, or finding sources of revenue that are less dependent upon foundations which may be resistant to the radical implications of the gospel when it comes to racial matters, or confronting how many routine assessments relied upon by universities increase racial marginalization. It is, of course, a common accusation that the contemporary university, from top-tier Ivies to flagship land-grant and research institutions to small Christian colleges like Sterling or Friends, has become a clumsy, unresponsive bureaucracy, more driven by the imperative of financial survival than by its sense of vocation. The conference didn't get deep into that accusation--and yet, for me at least, the more I thought about how extensively my own teaching, my own textbook selections, my own student advising, my own committee work and more, are all at least partially conditioned by routinized practices and procedures that potentially reflect racial assumptions that had been put in place long before I or any other current employees at our respective schools arrived...well, it's humbling, to say the least.

That kind of radical introspection is unfortunately often seen as inimical to conservatism: a respect for traditional truths and social norms is not compatible, the assumption goes, with this kind of structural critique. I would insist that that assumption is not correct, at least not entirely: tradition (as opposed to nostalgia-drenched "custom," as Christopher Lasch put it), with its socially and locally fortifying power, is by no means necessarily incompatible with critique, prophetic challenge, and subsequent adaptation. But it is a common enough assumption that many conservatives have long looked upon the implicit universalizing and leveling to be found within Christianity with a quiet, but consistent, rejection of those who take the Biblical message with radical seriousness, or at least those parts of that message dealing with strangers, immigrants, foreigners, and all other sorts of minorities. And the conservatism I speak of here is not just a matter of socio-political positioning; it's institutional as well, including the institution of the academy and even the small Christian college. (Relevant to this: a couple of weeks after the conference I spoke with another faculty member at Sterling College, who observed that perhaps one reason why the organizers of this conference felt they could put on something this potentially challenging to some of the norms of their community was because some of them were leaving Sterling for other academic jobs, and thus may have viewed the conference as a farewell challenge.)

For my part, though, the conference elicited a desire to rethink. We academics unfortunately often fall into the trap of pride (particularly of the self-involved, self-satisfying, institutional kind), and hence a humbling such as this conference delivered was probably much needed. Even if whatever racist presumptions some of my routines may reflect are entirely unknown to me, or entirely marginal in their effects they may have on students who may be too busy trying to juggle classes and jobs and relationships and goals to think carefully about the systems which surround them, I have a Christian duty, as an educator and as a member of a Christian community, to think systematically about how I can live up, as a teacher and scholar, to the values of inclusion and equality. The fact that the politics of these questions might make for uncomfortable bedfellows on occasion, in our schools or our congregations or our larger communities, doesn't provide an excuse from asking them of ourselves and our colleagues. If people in Sterling College, in tiny Sterling, KS, can find the resources and will to lay out these challenges so openly, however momentarily, then the rest of us ought to be able to do the same.

The Osmonds' Christmas, and Ours

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

The Osmond Christmas Album came out 45 years ago today, on December 18, 1976. I'm talking the original double-LP, of course, not the corrupt CD version which cut all of Merrill's and Jimmy's songs and was released 15 years later. For American Mormons of a certain age, the original--all 20 tracks of it--was an essential part of the holiday canon. It generated intense discussions of Mormon-specific trivia (was Donny singing to his then-girlfriend Debbie on "This Christmas Eve"?), gave rise to heated debates about family rules (surely, because it was the Osmonds and it was the holidays, we could play "Sleigh Ride" on Sundays, couldn't we?), and required parental intervention as arguments broke out over who was better at picking up and dropping the needle without scratching the vinyl when it came to skipping over "If Santa Were My Daddy" (which, of course, everyone did). Anyway, listen to the full thing here, if you feel so inclined (I have the original recorded onto a cassette tape--which, miraculously, I think 33 years on, still plays). Or watch the 1976 special, broadcast the day before the album was released. Man, Paul Lynde wasn't remotely Mormon, but I think he kind of loved my tribe, nonetheless.

Fathers, Friendship, and Holding onto Your Platoon (or Not)

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This old Cal Grondahl cartoon, from many years ago, has been on my mind for while:

It first came back to my mind as I was preparing for a sacrament meeting sermon on Father's Day, back in June, the first time I'd been at a church pulpit since before the pandemic. As I've explained before, the ward that my family and I had attended for years officially disappeared over a year ago--and its elimination by the stake, with consequent changes in boundaries which ended up dividing us from just about everyone we were close to in our former ward, has combined with the lock-downs and the many upheavals of 2020 (both personal and political), to make it hard for us to get back into the church-attending habit. The cartoon thus really struck me, because it was, predictably, the husband holding back his hysterical wife, patiently emphasizing the facts of the situation: "there's nothing you can do." 

That's the stereotype, right? When there is a difficult reality to face, when there are hard choices to make, when sacrifices must be accepted and leadership is required, who is supposed to provide it, in the church's official imagination? The husband, of course--the father, the patriarch. It's a stereotype that finds support in "The Family: A Proclamation to the World," after all: “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families.” 

Sure, the Proclamation allows that "individual adaptation" may sometimes be necessary, and it's not hard to find statements from general authorities of the church implying how there may be all sorts of undefined exceptions to general principles like these out there as well, and that's even assuming you take the Proclamation seriously as a matter of doctrine (which I don't). But still, it's hard to be a member of such a culturally uniform body of believers as American Mormonism and not feel, as I do, at least slightly condemned for being, as I am, a weak father, someone reluctant to insist, in some commanding way, that my family has to attend a congregation that they mostly do not know, and a church that some of them--and, to a degree, I as well--have come to see over the past year and a half as, institutionally at least, partly irrelevant, morally as well as politically, to their lives. 

Maybe that weakness isn't such a bad thing; maybe American Mormon fathers can flip the cultural script, sometimes, and not necessarily play the stoic, authoritative, "there's nothing you can do"-types. (And considering the fact that our church's demographics skew heavily female as soon as you age out of childhood, that's probably an unavoidable flip, even if the cultural presumptions haven't caught up, and perhaps, given our all-male leadership, perhaps never will.) Still, as our family's participation in Mormonism, after decades of constancy, becomes doubtful and worried and inconsistent in the midst of the changes and covid-19 variants still out there, I can't help but feel somewhat at fault.

Lately though, as my family has continued to struggle along, I've stopped thinking about the husband in the cartoon, and started thinking about the wife, and her plea to hold on to her friends.

When Joseph Smith spoke of friendship as "one of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism" he was speaking cosmologically; he may have given examples that were both personal and social, but his aim in introducing the idea, at least as I interpret the passage, is to emphasize how the friendship among members of the Mormon community will revolutionize the world, bringing us closer to the Millennial peace promised by the scriptures. Holding onto the Hendersons, as the cartoon satirizes, probably has no such theological weight. But...so what? Isn't it possible that insisting upon church activity in a particular place at a particular time, and thus upon supporting the leadership and the structures and the expectations culturally coded into the institutions of American Mormonism, all by way of a theological claim (the father in the cartoon might as well have said "Sharon, those with inspired priesthood authority have spoken; you can't challenge that"), is itself a stereotypically..."male" thing to do? Appealing to the cosmological principle of friendship, rather than real-world associations with one's actual neighbors and friends?

Of course, you will all say: dividing a ward hardly means you still can't spend time with the Hendersons! And that's correct. But we also all know that as fallen, embodied creatures, as creatures subject to human time and space, and subject to so many faults and limitations, we depend upon social structures to enable to us find and build upon the associations which bring virtue and purpose and joy into our lives. A Mormon congregation is, to twist slightly the famous Edmund Burke quote, "the subdivision...the little platoon we belong to in society." (Burke was talking at least as much about people embracing their place in the class hierarchy as he was about them loving their locality, but the general conservative principle holds.) 

We come into a subdivision, and we build, over time, memories, patterns of relationships, referents to people and events and experiences upon which we tell stories to ourselves about service, sacrifice, and simple pleasures. Can we do that anywhere, with any group of people, at any point of time? In theory, yes. But in practice, that kind of insistence (just start over again somewhere else!) valorizes exactly the kind of supposedly seamless, transactional modernity which, on a certain philosophical level at least, Mormonism ought to resist. In actual embodied life, becoming attached to a congregation takes time and costs effort--and as so many of us have experienced, the ward platoon we find ourselves may resist our best efforts at association (or, perversely, may bring out the associational worst in us). Thus to lose a subdivision that, over the years, came to mean seeing and catching up with and being comforted by the presence of genuine friends at Sunday meetings may well justify Sharon's desperate response.

Some will argue, not unreasonably, that the Mormon church is officially moving away from this kind of reliance upon congregational "platoons" anyway--that (perhaps inspired to prepare for the ward-and-activity-shuttering pandemic we have all experienced, and continue to experience) Mormonism is to become a "home-centered, church-supported" entity, and not just in the operations of Sunday School. To which I respond: well, maybe. If such decentralized hyper-localism--indeed, familialism--is to be the future of the faith, with our families (however we define them? or would only a clearly defined set of family associations count, perhaps those with the right sort of "Sharon, there's nothing you can do" patriarchs at their head?) serving as our "platoons," then some things needs to be seriously rethought, callings and boundaries and membership lists being just the start. In the meantime, though, we baptized members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we covenanted members of this particular interpretation of the body of Christ, are called to attend and support and receive the ordinances of salvation in our several subdivided places. And the difficulty of returning to such, for families like my own at least, remains.

Grace Olmstead's Uprooted Idaho, and My Own

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Last summer my family and I drove right by Emmett, Idaho, the ancestral home of Grace Olmstead, author of the wonderful, if imperfect, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind. Idaho's Gem County (Emmett is the county seat) is beautiful country, which it was good to reminded of. We were traveling from Spokane, Washington (where I was born and raised, and where my widowed mother--whom my children hadn't seen in years, and needed to visit--continues to live in a cabin atop what we call Fox Hill just over the Idaho border) to Gooding, Idaho (for a big family gathering which, out of pandemic-related concerns for our mother's health, we held someplace other than the old homestead). If we'd taken the interstate, we would have traveled faster, but missed the scenery, so instead we took state highways through the wheat fields of the Palouse, down into Hells Canyon, up again into the forested mountains around Payette Lake (we swam for a bit, but Sharlie, the legendary monster of Payette, made no appearance), and then down again towards Boise, before getting on the interstate and heading east across southern Idaho's Snake River Plain to our destination. If I'd known that reading Olmstead's book was in my future, I would have made sure we stopped for dinner in Emmett instead of later on.

I take the time to talk about the landscape around these places because it is the land of southwestern Idaho, and the people who built small farming towns like Emmett on that land, that Olmstead approaches in her book with great--though sometimes uneven--passion and grace. Uprooted is partly a memoir of her extended family (though mostly just her great-grandparents), partly a paean to a way of life that is both dying and which she never really understood while she grew up in the midst of it (and thus feels the loss of all the more deeply now), and partly a study of the causes of that dying, and how what has endured--the habits, the connections, the sense of place--has shaped her extended family nonetheless. She calls her book "an exercise in discernment" (pg. xiii, 206), and it was that element of the book which broke through my partial resistance to it. In presenting to the public her ongoing attempt to work through her own feelings about the decades-long decline of a town and the agrarian vocation which it served as a particular home for, all of which she has belated realized she loves, and moreover in doing so with such regional specificity, Olmstead forced a degree of reflection upon me--a person with his own family stories of Idaho and farms, stories which I, also, mostly now know only at a great distance, both physical and temporal.

For Olmstead, the heart of the story she wants to tell about Emmett, and about her own Howard family in that place, is her great-grandfather, Walter Allen Howard--or as Olmstead always refers to him, "Grandpa Dad," the marvelously inventive and hard-working (and, as the story unfolds, contrary and independent to a fault) patriarch of her clan. Born in 1911, and still driving a tractor and tending to his prized (and apparently somewhat secretly maintained) irrigation ditches until he passed away in 2008, Olmstead grounds her many ruminations about farming life and community attachment in near-constant references to Grandpa Dad's example. He was a man who embodied a certain kind of rootedness, to the land ("Grandpa Dad dug many of the ditches that still feed water to crops in north Emmett--all of them with a spade and his two hands"--pg. 5), to the community of Emmett ("He would often come in dirty from a long work day on the farm and head straight for the shower to clean up so he could attend a local meeting"--pg. 179), to his church ("To Grandpa Dad, some things mattered more than the price tag--and supporting his neighbor and Christian brother [who ran the only grocery store he was willing patronize] was one of those things"--pg. 141), and most of all to his family. Her portrait of this impressive man is a deeply loving one, and no wonder: to a great-granddaughter, shucking corn beside him, listening to him tell stories of his long-dead wife and recite poetry and spin tales of a land utterly transformed ("He was the first storyteller and historian I knew...overflowing with knowledge and narrative"--pgs. 5-6), he must have seemed an entirely lovable human being.

But Olmstead also thoughtfully makes use of such authors as Robert Nisbet, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, Robert Wuthnow, and Wendell Berry to elaborate upon the beauty, social utility, and moral worthiness of that particular rural rootedness which she most centrally associates with the memory of that human being and of his farm in Emmett. In particular, she makes use of the distinction employed by Wallace Stegner (and frequented emphasized by Berry as well) between "boomers"--those who "come to extract value from a place and then leave"--and "stickers"--"those who settle down and invest." She trenchantly observes that "Since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been more boomers than stickers in Idaho history" (pg. 21), and provides the background to make her point clear. Grandpa Dad, in contrast, was a sticker, and that haunts her.

Haunts her, because she, and her whole extended family, didn't actually stick, at least not entirely. Though the Howards were all deeply shaped by the connections which Grandpa Dad's work and care for the land and the community had built all around him, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren nonetheless never committed to that community or that work. They became bankers and pharmacists and engineers and, in Olmstead's case, a journalist in Washington DC. And here is where my internal reflection begins, because I could say something similar in regards to myself, and my own extended family. Our family's own Idaho farm, and the milk cows and alfalfa fields and vegetable gardens and calf pens and homemade fences and barns I grew up around and worked early mornings and late nights in, all through the 1970s and 1980s, have faded into an enduring set of Idaho-centric reminiscences, not something I--a college professor in Kansas, with siblings working in real estate and communications and investment and education--can really claim any rootedness in, especially not over the past fifteen years or so, as we have settled in Wichita and as our children have grown up.

There are differences, to be sure: my own great-grandfather, and grandfather (that's a photo of him there, standing in the crop fields along the Kootenai river north of Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, sometime in the early 1950s), and my father too, all mostly approached agriculture as a business endeavor--something lovely in its own right, to be sure, and something they studied well and worked hard at and thought important enough (or at least money-making enough) to impress upon us children. They weren't dilettantes when it came to growing wheat, driving combines, bailing hay, leveling ground, raising calves, breaking horses, and all the rest. But to them it was also, in the end, something to expand and outsource (a four generations of Amoths, a Mennonite family, have really done most of the daily work on that Idaho land) and trade upon and sell off (the Amoths now own the farm) as the situation warranted. This is very different from Olmstead's Grandpa Dad, who wouldn't take government subsidies and, as the decades went by, continually "refused to get big and refused to get out" (p. 64). Not that his impressive example at all affected the economic, cultural, and governmental realities which depressed his own community (and which my own ancestors recognized and, when they could, both profited and escaped from). Emment's agrarian community has suffered the same catastrophic decline in numbers of farms, in wealth, in population, and in environmental health that you see in rural areas all across the country. But either way, whether our family histories reach back through an engagement with farming as something to get into and get out of while the getting was good, or an engagement that was grounded in a true sense of vocation and community...it was something that didn't last.

Olmstead is very good at making the case that it might not have been this way; the viability of sticking with the farm and with the rural communities which long centered the lives of large numbers of Americans--include her family and mine--might have been preserved. If the centralizing logic of finance capitalism had been prevented from cheering on agribusinesses like Monsanto as they effectively robbed farmers of control of their own seed; if the global marketplace had been pushed away from prioritizing commodity crops which served international trade and put the burden on farmers to expand and homogenize and go into debt in order to do so; if government supports and subsidies had been directed at maintaining local networks of producers instead of ever larger and ever more costly farms that could maximize on production for the expansionist purposes of the Cold War-era American state; if, if, if...well, then maybe things would be different. As it is, though, they aren't. Olmstead details the lives of many contemporary farmers in the Emmett area who are sticking it out despite the obstacles all around them--people like Susan and Peter Dill of Saint John's Organic Farm, the Williams family at Waterwheel Gardens, or Terry and Ashley Walton who (thanks to a Farm Service Agency loan) purchased Grandpa Dad's farm after he passed away and no one in the family had any interest in preserving it. But her deep engagement with these topics--with America's broken food system, its exploitative farm labor practices, its consumer-mad economy, and its poisonous addiction to treating the land almost always as either a brute calorie resource or a recreational site for visiting elites, and almost never as respectful localities where people can build lives for themselves--all makes her doubtful that even a great many farmers like her great-grandfather could ever make enough of a difference:

Grandpa Dad emerged from the difficulties of poverty in this landscape by not moving--by staying in one spot for his entire life. But wealth is no longer build through allegiance to a community or a town; it is increasingly achieved in isolation by individuals and grown through rootlessness, not through loyalty....Without systemic change--without a revaluing of the soil, or all the land that depends on it, of the farmers to cultivate and steward it--I fear sticking might not even be enough. Too much has changed. Too much has been lost (pgs. 126, 175).

What kind of systemic change? In a word, an abandonment of the cranky individualism which is so central to the myth of the family farm in America. Olmstead documents how as early as 150 years ago perceptive writers and government leaders were already pointing out the economic and environmental necessity of farmers forming "cooperative communities" rather than "privately owned patchworks" (pg. 56); this vision of individual (rather than collective) and libertarian (rather than local) self-sufficiency has long endured, with arguably ruinous results--the real story behind of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books provides one example, and the separation of the extended Howard family from what Grandpa Dad had laboriously built provides another ("Grandpa Dad's fierce independence was likely part of the reason our family no longer belonged to Emmett, or to the farm....The farm was always his: something others helped with but were never integrated into"--pgs. 182-183). In place of such ferocious denials of the collective, Olmstead, repenting of her youthful attachment to "free-market capitalism and limited government," applauds federal programs designed to "get a younger, more diverse, and more sustainable population on the land," to use "public funds and efforts to undergird civil associations: not just investing in individuals, but also the groups and networks that support them," and to basically just use government policies to push back against the "reductive thinking that breaks down the farm's purpose to fit solely profit-focused ends," and to instead "strengthen local economic sovereignty" (pgs. 186-190). The change she'd want to see, in other words, is a populist one. Not the faux-populism of the Trump era, of course, but the kind of populism--that is, the kind of collective, inclusive, democratic action which economically empowers local places--which farmers like Wendell Berry have both striven to build and constantly emphasized for decades.

But would such systemic changes actually bring about a return to the land? That's a harder question, and one likely not much influenced by changes in politics. For her part, Olmstead sees her own political evolution ("I'm neither Republican nor libertarian these days....but...someone who cares deeply about...the issues of racial injustice, economic exploitation, and ecological abuse"--pgs. 202-203) as actually creating additional obstacles to her return to the red-state land she loves--though she suspects it will happen eventually, as her parents grow older and become more in need of her care. More important than any political disagreement or policy recommendation, though, is the difficulty of simply accepting the sacrifice that a return to the rural will involve for people who have organized their whole conception of the self, whether they realize it or not, in opposition to the kind of communal beauties which belonging to a small, land-based, productive community may (it's always a maybe; never a surety) involve. Our acceptance of community transience, consumer disposibility, and capitalist booming will not easily or quickly turn around--though trying to do so is a must. As Olmstead note's in her conclusion:

To choose rootedness, we must acknowledge the fact that, as Simone Weil points out, a desire for profit, unless tempered by other goods and goals, tends to destroy human roots. We have to seek out larger goals than financial fulfillment, than reaching the next rung on the social or economic ladder. We have to consider whether the perfect career or paycheck will offer us the fulfillment or happiness we lack--or whether the cost of transience is, in fact, too high a cost. It is true that providing for ourselves and our families and having solid employment are fundamental considerations. But we must also remember that they are not the only questions or goals worth considering (pg. 217).

I should note that Olmstead's book, in my judgment anyway, is not at its absolute best when it comes to those "fundamental considerations." While the impassioned case she makes for Emmett--or at least for the sort of local food and tight communities and productive land which can be found in a place like Emmett--is well-informed and wise, it doesn't hold together as tightly as it might have if she'd approached questions of cost, as they are born by those who actually live in the region, somewhat more consistently. She has a long profile of the Little family--part of "the state's agriculture royalty"--whose climb to the top of Idaho's state government and Republican party began in Emmett, but there is strangely little analysis or critique there (are we really supposed to believe that the Little's massive leased-out ranches and the Williams's "twenty-five dense acres of fruit and vegetables" both reflect the same "decision to invest in this community"?--pgs. 160-164). Another time she profiles a self-described "Emmett original," a young woman who only wanted to escape the town ("there aren't enough jobs in this valley, she told me, and she thinks the education system is rather poor"), and while her journey out of Idaho includes some intriguing bumps (she turned down the prospect of Oregon State University because "I just didn't . . . see no one in cowboy boots"--pgs. 116-119), she did up leaving to study journalism elsewhere--very much like Olmstead herself. What's her story, and what does it tell us readers, or Olmstead herself, about how we, or she, should total up the educational or economic costs of her, or our own, staying versus leaving? Again, by mostly skimping on the structural or ideological aspects of this act of investigation, the point is not clear.

But then, no book should be expected to clearly explain--or critique, for that matter--every consequence and cost of the story they aim to tell, and certainly not a book like Uprooted, whose overriding purpose, as Olmstead insisted, is just to discern something about her own story, and the story of a family and a town and a region and a vocation she loves and remembers and is still shaped by, however great the distance. And I wonder if any criticisms I have of the book aren't rooted (yes, I see what I did there) in how it pushed me to think through and discern better my own distant agrarian connections--ones that, I cannot deny, were never as strong as Olmstead's, nor ones that I have attended to with anything like her own dedication or insight or generosity. Grace Olmstead's book may not be the final masterpiece of all possible localist argument, but it is a set of very smart reflections on localism and rural life which are specific enough, and thoughtfully expressed enough, to bring up in my mind the Fox family's own private agrarian Idaho, and to reflect upon--and also mourn, if just a little--my distance from it's own beauty as well. As I wrote above, I wish I'd read this book before my family made our visit to my old home and our drive to southern Idaho last summer. But now that I've read it, I can at least remember it a little bit differently, and a little bit better too.