The 10 Best Books I Read in 2024

Ian Angus, The War against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism (2023) and Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (2022).

I put these two books together in my head not because they are similar, because they are not—the former is a succinct, straightforward, deeply earnest but also very dry Marxist history of the enclosure movement in Great Britain, the latter is a rambling, profoundly personal and discursive and sometime repetitive set of reflections by the author on the legacy of slavery, the devastation of the farming economy, and how American exceptionalism and predatory capitalism ties them both together. I put them together because, as I elaborated here, the excellent analysis of the former helped me find the best, most profound insights of the latter.

Fred Dallmayr, Truth and Politics: Toward a Post-Secular Community (2022)

Fred Dallmayr, a long-time professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Notre Dame who passed away this year, was never one of my teachers—directly, that is. Indirectly, he was an inspiration and, in a very small way, a friend, and on the occasion of his passing I went back and read deeper from his massive corpus. What I found, among many other wise and challenging observations, was a different way to talk about the post-liberal moment, a way that America will almost certainly not be able to make use of, to our great loss.

Grant Hardy, ed., The Annotated Book of Mormon (2023)

Grant Hardy’s decades of work on the Book of Mormon—the central holy scripture of my religious tradition—has resulted in multiple previous works of devotion and scholarship that I’ve learned much from. Last year, he finally was able to achieve something of a magnum opus: a complete critical edition of the text of the Book of Mormon itself. My appreciation of it, as both a believer and a doubter (and how much do those two go together!), is massive, to say the least.

Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (1989)

In 2023, one of the best books I read was by Stanley Hauerwas, a radical Christian thinker whose essays and ideas I’d long thought about, but whom I’d never really studied before. This year I continued with that new direction by giving Hauerwas’s probably most famous book a read, and I wasn’t disappointed. Co-written with William Willimon, when both of them were young scholars and pastors, this book lays down the fundamentals of Hauerwas’s radically Barthian, church-over-culture, Christianity-over-society, perspective, the one which later came to be called “neo-Anabaptist.” Reading this book at the same time as the 2024 elections, its constant reminders of the uselessness of trying to make Christianity “relevant” to a world of violence, competition, and exploitation, was a deeply persuasive experience, to say the least.

Charles Marohn, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis (2024)

Chuck Marohn hasn’t yet written a book that I haven’t found bursting with concepts and conclusions worth wrestling with, and his latest is probably the bursting-est yet. This is the first time Marohn has written with a co-author, and perhaps that was necessary; the Strong Towns approach to America’s housing crisis obliges him to weigh in on a huge number of historical, financial, political, and sociological issues, far beyond his earlier works which focused on the comparatively more straight-forward questions of community sustainability and transportation management. I’ve found myself in multiple arguments over this book, and it’s advice is definitely not the final word on figuring out how to both build ourselves out of, and better arrange our financing of, America’s housing problems. But his words are worth listening to all the same.

Eva Piirimäe, Herder and Enlightenment Politics (2023)

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, I discovered the communitarian-liberalism debates of the 1980s, which in turn led me to Charles Taylor, which in turn led me to German romanticism, and in particular the philosophy and criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder, a late 18^th-century German educator, translator, and Lutheran pastor, one of the truly great—and often frustratingly changeable—intellects of the Enlightenment era. I wrote my dissertation on him, but the days when I thought I would be a true Herder scholar and intellectual historian are long past. Still, every once in a while the blessings of academia allow me to dive once more back into this area of scholarship—and for the first time in a decade, 2024 allowed me that, with the opportunity to review new book that is, in some ways, genuinely path-breaking, at least insofar as English-language scholarship on Herder is concerned. It reminded me of, and perhaps opened up, some old paths for me, and for that I’m grateful for.

George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For? (2009) and Only a Voice: Essays (2023)

Scialabba is a near-legendary critic and pundit, at least among that small group of writers, publishers, and thinkers that make up America’s tiny-but-not-quite-extinct-yet population of “public intellectuals.” A man who made his name writing sharp, both open-minded but also deeply opinionated essays on important intellectual figures of both the past and present, I’d read several of the pieces in this first collection years ago. Fortunately, the opportunity to write an essay on Scialabba gave me a chance to both re-read them, and peruse this latest collection. Everything in them is brilliant, even if you find his consistently contrary (and, I would argue, in important ways “conservative”) leftism not to your taste.

Paul B. Thompson, The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics (2010)

Returning once again to last year, one of the best books I read in 2023 was the wonderfully dense yet still student-friendly introduction to “sustainability” as a general topic, Sustainability: What Everyone Needs to Know, which Thompson wrote with a co-author, Patricia Norris. This year I finally worked through a book of his published articles and essays--published over a period of 20 years from the late 1980s to the late 2000s--that I’ve had on my shelf for years, and I wasn’t disappointed. While much of what is included here has long since become familiar within the field, he still often surprised me with creative insights (his essay focusing on a reading of The Grapes of Wrath and the John Ford film adaptation of it particularly stands out). Overall, this book is an excellent, thoughtful review of the difficulties and opportunities which thinking seriously about agrarianism, environmentalism, and the differences between them presents.

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.

Wichita and the Road Ahead

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

In the midst of violent protests, police violence, and a pandemic, I'm thinking about a road.

It's not much of a road; just a short stretch of University St., directly west of Friends University, where I've taught since 2006. Over those 14 years, I have biked back and forth on that 1/10th of a mile stretch, which dead-ends 50 ft. short of Meridian Ave., probably over 7000 times. It's the final leg of my normal commute route; I bike from my home in west Wichita eastbound on Maple St., cutting south to University at West St. As this segment of University doesn't intersect Meridian, I just ride on the railroad crossing to pop back onto University when the road dead-ends, at which point it's a straight shot to campus. My westbound return follows the same route, which I've ridden so often I can navigate this part of University with my eyes closed. Except I can't right now, because the road is all torn up. (And yes, I have still biked regularly into the campus over the past two months, letting myself into my office while the whole campus stood almost entirely empty; the camera on my office computer is a lot better for recording lectures and conducting online classes than mine at home.)

Of course, the construction isn't any kind of real problem; I can just bike around the bulldozers and dump trucks, and besides the rear entrance to the parking lot for Friends's Garvey Art Center is right there if I can't get through the construction. There are a couple of single-family homes along the street, so it was presumably greater hassle for them--but since everything else which borders both sides of the road belongs to my university, it's mostly folks like me who use it. And while I have no right to or responsibility for the road in any kind of formal sense, I nonetheless found myself somewhat curious about it all. Maybe a little bothered, even.

Why bothered? Well, partly because in the midst of the present pandemic, every penny counts. The job losses which followed in the wake of the life-preserving shutdowns that COVID-19 made necessary have resulted in record unemployment claims, and that means both major declines in tax revenue and major strains on the budgets of the cities of Kansas. Wichita is looking at an $11 million dollar deficit in the coming fiscal year, and as Chase Billingham of Wichita State has noted, while a little of the CARES millions which the federal government has designated as aid for state and local governments has been made available to some targeted programs in the city (like transit), Wichita's general fund itself hasn't received a dime. That may change, and the economy may bounce back more quickly than most economists are predicting. Still, with the advice offered by Charles Marohn's Strong Towns very much on my mind, especially when it comes to what cities like Wichita can do to strengthen the neighborhoods which are crucial to getting us through this time of transition, I kept looking at that construction as I biked past it and wondered: did this road really need to be repaired? Was this the best use of the city's money at this time? Who asked for or decided upon this repair job, and how much does it cost, anyway?

So I started shooting out e-mails. It quickly became clear that this was a construction job that came from the city, not from any stakeholders along the road. (Both the university president and our director of maintenance first found out about the construction when they received a notification from Kansas Paving, a company contracted by the city, that work on the street was about to start.) With some help from Paul Gunzelman, the Assistant City Engineer for the city of Wichita, I was eventually put in contact with Aaron Henning, a maintenance engineer with the city's Public Works & Utilities department. They were able to supply me with city documents and answer all my questions--well, all except the one I consider to be most important, but that one isn't actually an engineering question: it's a political one.

I have nothing but compliments for Paul and Aaron; for every annoying query I put to them about the meaning of acronyms like "OP3" ("Outsourced Pavement Preservation Program"--it's been years, apparently, since the bulk of the routine maintenance of Wichita's more than 5100 miles of road has been handled by the city's own workers) or "PCI" ("Pavement Condition Index," a numerical rating determined in part by staff members who, over the course of 18 months, physically visit every single segment of the aforementioned 5100 miles of road), they had a thorough answer. Insofar as this little stretch of University beside Friends which I know so well goes, the story goes like this:

The PW&U Department has developed a computerized method of ranking various inputs regarding roads (called "DST," for Decision Support Tool), including not just the observed condition of the street, but its primary material (concrete or asphalt?), and whether repairs on the road would fall under the label "preservation" (acting to prevent further deterioration) or "mitigation" (acting to limit the extent of already progressing deterioration). It turns out that this little concrete stretch of University had a PCI of 35, the second lowest ranked concrete street segment in the whole city. And so when 2019's budget was set (in which the OP3 was given $9.5 million, $3 million from the city's General Fund, $6.5 million out of the mostly debt-financed Capital Improvement Plan, with a little over $1 million specifically earmarked for repairing concrete roads), it got prioritized within the funds allocated to District 4, in which Friends University and this street is found. Hence, come late spring of 2020 (and no, I didn't bother asking about the delay; I know how things can pile up), a contract was drawn up for about 55% of the segment's total paved area to be patched and replaced, at a cost of about $45,000, and off Kansas Paving went to do its job. All clear?

Well, sure. Again, I make no criticism of Aaron or Paul or any other city engineers or any of the PW&U staff, and I foresee no reason to criticize the professionalism or efficiency of Kansas Paving. A large number of people, all responding to one another, all passing information and decisions and money along, all getting a road in better shape. This is the way cities should work, right?

But here is where I say--maybe not? Especially, maybe not right now? I go back to my original point: this was a stretch of road I knew very, very well. Was it in great shape? Not at all. Was it in terrible shape? Again, not at all. (Just look at the Google Map photo of it above.) It was a perfectly serviceable 1/10th-mile-long access road use by 1) a couple of private homeowners, 2) those Friends staff, faculty, or students who found a need to drive the 530 feet to the back entrance of the Garvey Art Center, and 3) me, biking east and west on the road, morning and afternoon, year after year after year. As Aaron assured me, no one put in any kind of request to fix this road; it was the DST that determined its time had come, and once calculations were made about what kind of mitigation vs. preservation could be done, costs were tabulated and people were put to work. At the total estimated cost of, roughly speaking, an entire yearly salary of the average probation officer, carpet installer, librarian, title examiner, payroll clerk, or--hey!--civil engineering technician here in the state of Kansas.

Wait, it doesn't work that way!--that's what everyone who read the previous paragraph will say, and they'd be right; it's not like there is any easy way to all of a sudden stop some existing flow of money and divert it to someone or something else. But this is the important, political question I mentioned before: why? Especially during a pandemic, when our city--like cities all across the country--is facing an immediate, and potentially long-enduring, fiscal crisis, why is there no mechanism for people to look at the flows of money which course through our, or any, city's systems, and reconsider? Don't forget that money spent on roads is money that invariably sets up additional maintenance costs, costs that only increase as time goes by. That's not a criticism of those people like Aaron or Paul who have spent their whole professional careers trying to balance so many conflicting demands, and discover the most sustainable way to stretch the dollars they have. If anything, it's a suggestion that maybe they've haven't been supported in going far enough in their thinking about what really needs to be preserved, versus what can stand for just a little mitigation, versus what could really, honestly, just maybe, if only for right now, be allowed to be left alone.

I look around Wichita, and I see--just while walking our dog around our west Wichita neighborhood--more people gardening, more people fixing up their homes, more people setting out chairs and hanging out with one another in their driveways or on the sidewalks, just talking, than I can recall from any previous year. Obviously the fact that restaurants, bars, and other restaurants were closed, and many people were working from home, has been a primary cause of much of that--but perhaps not the only cause? The economic costs of the pandemic have been terrible, and are likely only to continue--and in response, people have been trying to find other, different ways of getting things done. One thing that many of them (that many of us) will need to continue exploring these new, perhaps more sustainable alternatives to work and food and shelter and entertainment is--as the Strong Towns Toolkit points out--cash, both local and immediate. Cities need to hang on to what the fiscal reserves they have, and think carefully and creatively about new ways to spend it.

Am I saying that the half-dozen or so workers I've seen out on University over the past couple of weeks couldn't use the money? Of course not! I'm completely open to the idea that generating road work for Kansas Paving is an entirely defensible act of Keynesian spending, of priming the pump. But then again, if you really want to see the money the city has going directly to the city's neighborhoods and residents, then why not just cancel all the orders for sand and 2x4s and concrete which the University repair job requires, and just deliver whatever portion of that $45,000 would have been dedicated to wages directly to the workers (and maybe with a little extra thrown in), and then keeping the rest on hand? It's not like there aren't problems aplenty which challenge Wichita's ability to move in a more sustainable way through this crisis.

For example, I think about local farmers and food producers I know--in Valley Center, Haysville, Andover--who have struggled to be part of a more sustainable food system here in Wichita; like perhaps a third of all small food operations across the country right now, the Covid Depression is threatening to wipe many of them out. Years ago, when drought threatened south-central Kansas, Wichita's government found the money to establish a rebate program (which still exists today!) incentivizing how people were spending money on sprinkling their lawns and washing their clothes. Surely some cutbacks on little-used roads could provide the city with the accounting flexibility to do something similar with one of our greatest assets: the fact that, unlike many comparable mid-sized cities, it's really quite easy here to grow food?

Well, eventually this little stretch of University will be done, and I won't see during my commute the sort of work which set my mind going on this long tangent. There are, absolutely, many more important topics to argue about right now than this one. But perhaps this small issue could be, should be, a way to get at a much larger one--namely, how to politically move our city to reconsider, or maybe just take further, the ways in which it seeks to prioritize and make more durable the decisions it makes and the money it spends. There will be, I am certain, perhaps 10 or so people that will be really happy with this fixed-up road. I may even be one of them! But I can think of other ways, more genuinely and democratically empowering ways, that the city leaders could spend money that might make even more people happy, in the long run. Here's hoping they can start seeing them (and that we will know how to help them do so!).