Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

For ten years now, I've been teaching one version or another of a class on personal simplicity and economic and environmental sustainability here at Friends University, a formerly Quaker, non-denominational Christian, small liberal arts college in Wichita, KS. Though I teach at a religious university, I don't teach religion myself--and for that reason, I at first doubted that Jennifer Ayres's Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education would much that would be pedagogically relevant to me, despite my strong sympathy with her subject matter. In this, I was partly wrong. While Ayres's book includes many intriguing (and a few borderline outrageous) educational suggestions, its greatest value to me as a teacher is the way it inspires me to take stock of what I've tried to do with with my sustainability class, and to perhaps rethink what my primary goals in that course should be.

My original aim in the design of this class--about which I've probably shared my thoughts about too many times already--was always primarily getting students out of the classroom and into the growing, producing, fecund Kansas ecosystems all around us, showing them that there are patterns of life that can keep people fed and housed and happy without committing oneself to the rat race. It shouldn't have been a shock to me, after I'd lived in Kansas for a few years, to realize how many of my students really had no connection with farming or food systems--but it was, nonetheless. Sometimes broad popular stereotypes about "living in the heartland" would be confirmed as I talked with the students taking the class, and some of them would end up taking the lead in teaching me about cattle ranching or winter wheat or regenerative agriculture. But more often than not, my own agricultural background, limited as it is, nonetheless greatly eclipsed theirs. And so I figured that, whatever else I might be able to communicate to my students about Wendell Berry or John Woolman, I should at the very least get them out of the city and take them to some farms--as well as urban farmers markets and community gardens and other kinds of local sustainable business operations, perhaps going so far as to work on one of our own.

In doing all of that, I'd like to think I've been fairly successful, at least insofar as the "getting them out of Wichita" part is concerned. Even in the midst of the worst of the pandemic last summer and fall, different butchers and ranchers and food producers were willing to sacrifice some of their busy days to let students--majors in Conservation Science, Health Science, History & Politics, and more--come and tour their land, their independent meatpacking processing operations, their homemade tomato and lettuce greenhouses, their cheese-making and milk processing facilities, and so much more. These kinds of experiences don't, I'll be the first to admit, necessarily provide the students with the sort of detailed know-how necessary for them to develop more sustainable practices in their own lives. But as Ayres herself insists, knowledge about one's ecological surroundings are only the tip of the iceberg; as she writes, "Cultivating [the] capacity for inhabitance"--which she defines as "seeking to know and love and particular place in some detail and honoring its [ecological] rhythms, limits, and possibilities"--"requires personal and social transformation at a level far deeper than that of figuring out ‘greener solutions'" (pp. 3, 17). Thus the aim of those who aspire to "educate for inhabitance"--which I realized, in reading this book, clearly describes me--has to involve figuring out ways to engage the affections of others, their bodies and appetites and emotions and creative imaginations. If that seems intuitively true, it may be simply because philosophers from Aristotle to Polanyi have consistently argued that nothing can so engage people as real tactile experience, and real practical work. So far as that goes...as I said, I think I've done fairly well on the first, though not so much on the second.

To be clear: any success I've had with the first has to be attributed, first and foremost, to having an exemplar to draw upon, and becoming friends with Leroy Hershberger--a mechanic, handy-man, cook, juggler, bicyclist, and born story-teller, all with a degree from Yale--a decade ago has made all the difference in my life and the life of so many of my students. Some of them from years before have told me that dinners at the Hershbergers were one of the highlights of their entire college education. They remember well Leroy's glorious beard (that he shaved it off during the pandemic came as profound shock of several of them!), the kind words of his mother Mary, the inquisitive questions of his father William (who passed away at the age of 80 during the pandemic; Leroy's tribute to his father was touching, kind, and wise), and most of all the joy the whole Hershberg family take in being able to introduce young people a life more focused on the land, on real material productivity, and in that way a whole ecosystem--both ecological and economic, to say nothing of also spiritual--that exists and enlivens the worldview of many outside the hustle and bustle of our urban college campus.

I've sometimes been challenged--or, indeed, given the vicissitudes of trying to do my part to not just educate students but also keep my tuition-driven college campus alive and functioning, sometimes I have challenged myself--as to the real "outcomes" of this class and these excursions. Am I trying to turn my students into farmers, into rural proprietors and local producers? If so, why, and am I at all successful at it anyway? Every educator in today's late capitalist world confronts those questions of metrics and assessments at one point or another, and it's hard for me to conceive of anyone serious about the teaching profession who doesn't recognize the harmful framing they introduce into the very idea of paideia--that is, of the formation of the human person which a proper education should involve.

That may not mean that such questions can--much less should--be simply dismissed as irrelevant; our students live in this late capitalist world too, and are looking to find ways to discover livelihoods, relationships, and most of all places of productive inhabitance within it. If we as teachers provide no bridge from the formation we hope to introduce to their affections to the challenges facing them upon the conclusion of their education, then we haven't served them well at all. Ayres reminds me of all this, with wise comments on matters of both paideia (which she presents as an acknowledgement of the communities within which we are formed, and the responsibility of constructive critique which community membership must entail--p. 62) and place (which she defines as any location which, through human inhabitation, "is imbued with meaning, with histories, and [most crucially] with contestations"--p. 88). Creating, through my classes, opportunities for my students to come face-to-face, and hand-to-hand, with people like the Hershbergers and dozens of others who have exemplified simpler and more sustainable forms of life hopefully also gives them 1) a model of the love of place, and 2) the incentive to recognize, come to know, and thereby carefully--but unsparingly--critique their own places. 

Do I imagine that such incentives and models will automatically transform my students into ecologically, environmentally, agriculturally informed inhabitants of wherever they live? Obviously not, especially since my own inhabitation still falls short in so many ways. But life is long, and beginning students along a path scattered with seeds for reflection, fits in, again, with the kind of trust in the slow pace of creation which Ayers speaks of eloquently:

[S]low knowledge is the kind of knowledge necessary for an ecologically conscious person or community. It is cultivated together and shared, is deeply related to the context in which it is nurtured, and acknowledges--indeed, embraces--human limitations....[M]ost importantly, it demands human patience and attentiveness. It will not be rushed. In the not rushing, in the attentiveness, wisdom is cultivated and inoculates human consciousness against the seductions of technological progress and the quick fix....

In formal education settings, the push toward more content coverage and measurable success makes the proposal of slowing down, reading less, and reflecting more somewhat of a pedagogical and institutional risk. In religious communities, "slow learning" meets other institutional pressures: in a season of anxiety about declining religious affiliations and lackluster participation in education programs, religious and educational leaders might be seduced by slick curriculum packets that promise effortless preparation and meaning engagement with learners. The principle of slow knowledge, however would suggest that efficiency and meaning are sometimes at cross-purposes. Meaning takes time (pp. 72-73).

The relevance of ecological language to the slow formation of ideas, in the lives of students or parishioners or anyone else, contrary to what Ayres calls--learning heavily on Berry, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Wes Jackon, David Orr, and many others--the "uncritical embrace of the efficiencies and networking capacities of technology" (p. 4) should be obvious. Equally obvious is how committing to the enacting of that slow formation--such as by growing a garden--can only strengthen that relevance. But that, of course, is where things get exponentially harder. It is one thing, in the midst of whirlwind of experiences that make up a college education, to get students to pause for an hour, or a day, or maybe even longer, and enable them to put their hands on the soil and the food and the people who can provide them with real models of belonging and critique. It is an entirely different thing to commit students to fill up that pause with the daily, weekly, monthly work of growing things in a garden, and to be able to see and, eventually, taste the results of their own re-orientation.

For close to a decade, many of us here at Friends have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to commit our students--and ourselves!--to projects requiring some genuine husbandry in a garden space on our campus. Sometimes there have been real successes, and sometimes the space has lain almost entirely forgotten for an academic year (or more). The space in general has much improved since the early conversations about it, and the first rush of enthusiasm to transform what was a vacant lot beside a student housing complex. But an entirely sustainable component of Wichita's local food system--much less even just Friend University's!--the garden is absolutely not. It remains, month in and month out, dependent upon the vision and determination of a few of us, and the occasional student or two or five who find ways to make the time spent working in the garden satisfy either their own personal commitments or their academic responsibilities or both. But even in those happy situations, we'll likely only have a season or two from the students in question: they are, after all, young people, seeking to gain the learning (and the certification of having received such) that will enable them to find their own place, and make their own commitments, on their own schedule, not necessarily Mother Nature's. So we make the most of the seasons we have, and continue to try our best to get the carrots and arugula and potatoes to grow, in the same way I try my best to make my classes spark agrarian and ecological ideas that might never have occurred to the students before. Sometimes, it all works. And when it doesn't, we trust in God's grace and the fecundity of both the Kansas soil and the college student's mind, and try again.

That kind of attitude is always going to be dispiriting to some. They might look at Ayres's book and note that she hardly ever addresses the complex structural forces which likely make it difficult for an education in inhabitance to translate into the creation care she considers imperative. The same criticism could made of the three-credit hour college class I teach once a year at a not-especially-notable Christian college in the middle of Kansas, of course: how is that really addressing the obstacles to inhabitance. But as utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" it may seem, that doesn't mean we still can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind. Or at least I do--and I thank Ayres for reminding me of that ideal. She is a teacher speaking to other teachers, like me. She is urging, through her book, those of us who have grasped the imperative of seeking to cultivate a greater concern for ecological and economic and spiritual sustainability to “envision...a way of inhabitance that may not yet be entirely possible,” holding on to the faith that the communities we might be building through our teaching “can imagine and do and become that which one person cannot on their own” (p. 129). Perhaps "envisioning for inhabitation" isn't a bad goal for my class, as I take it into its next decade.

20 and 15 Years, and More

20 years ago today--May 12, 2001--I was awarded my Doctor of Philosophy in Politics from Catholic University of American in Washington, DC; I became a Ph.D. And yesterday, with the submission of my final grades, I completed 15 years of teaching here at Friends University in Wichita, KS, the school that I have come to identify with so strongly that I hope to work here for another 15 years (or 20 years) more. Which means that, if God and family and my health is willing, my life as a Ph.D. will end up as having been, for all intents and purposes, basically synonymous with teaching our mostly south-central Kansas students here at Friends about political ideologies, American history, constitutional law, and theories of government and sustainability and economy, as well as playing the professor of political science in the local media and on civic boards when it comes to elections and court decisions and whatnot. As Robert Bolt's version of Thomas More once said, "not a bad public that."

Looking back over the past 15 and 20 years, I can see I've written a lot about how I think about it all: figuring out my place within academia as a small liberal arts college professor in Kansas, figuring out what kind of politics I can or should be teaching to these kind of students in this kind of mid-sized place, figuring out what I really took from my graduate education and experience (which was in some ways very cosmopolitan, and in other ways very parochial), and how much what I became as a professor can be traced back to those years in Washington DC, as opposed to something which came along later from hours in the classroom, from interactions with colleagues, and from the ever-changing vicissitudes as well as the constant recurrences of academic life. Looking back on some of those posts, I'm a little embarrassed--but only a little. My vision for developing a "political science" that would fit what I had offer and what Friends University could support from back in 2009 seem kind of immature to me now (but hey--I was only an associate professor back then). Looking back 5 years ago, I think 10 years of teaching and professing, in the classroom and around the city, had given me a little more perspective on what in my understanding of my own vocation had changed, and how much the place in which I was practicing that vocation was responsible for those changes. By now, stuff that was just developing at that time has born some genuine fruit: my major is now "History & Politics" (hopefully the last name change for a good long while!), my teaching and research is strongly focused around matters of urban democracy and sustainability, and my approach is sufficiently divorced from our increasingly statistics-driven Social & Behavioral Science division that I've moved my program (because at a SLAC, the faculty can decide such things) over to Theology & Humanities, where I also hope it'll stay. In short: it's taken a while, but I can see that I've built something over the last 15 years--not what I originally expected to build, to be sure, but something I'm committed to nonetheless. And I definitely want to be able to plan on another 15, or perhaps 20, years of teaching to build it further.

As for my Ph.D. experience, now 20 years gone, I now find it returning to me in a way I never anticipated before. Our oldest daughter (a mostly proud KU graduate!) is following the Ph.D. route, pursing a doctorate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in their e-mails and phone calls home I'm occasionally thrown back into that maddening world of "read another book!" whenever confronted with questions structural or theoretical or historical or critical. And yet, as hopeless as I know their prospects likely are--just as I know how hopeless the prospects of every other student I've ever taught who has ever expressed any sort of admiration or envy or desire in regards the possibility of being lucky enough to become a college professor like myself--I cannot get myself to pretend that my graduate education (for all its ups and downs, for all its costs and consequences, for all the ways it both opened up and empowered my mental world as well as failed to prepare my mind for the future or actually prepared me for the wrong things) wasn't pretty great. I loved it, and yes, I love being able to see my daughter--hopefully with their eyes fully open to the costs and consequences which are shaping them!--going through the same experience, and sometimes being able to get tastes of it through them. Their Ph.D. experience isn't mine, but still, the memories--at least of the good times--are strong.

I'm not sure what else to say. 15 years, or even 20, is just a drop in the bucket in the long run, and what seemed obvious to me when I was 40 isn't exactly the same as what seemed vital to say when I turned 50, even if the continuity between them is obvious, and will always remain so, even if I was inclined to attempt to separate myself from it all, which I'm not. Friends might go bankrupt tomorrow, or Kansas could turn overnight into a tyrannical fascist state, or some other personal or family catastrophe might happen, and everything that came before--my Ph.D., my teaching career, the roots I've put down in this place and before these students and these neighbors and fellow citizens--could go up in smoke. I sure hope not, though. I want my 20-year-old and 15-year-old histories to continue into the future, to throw out ever more branches and build ever stronger continuities and connections, through our children and our friends and more. This year, a Friends University teaching award that I cannot deny I'd envied for 15 years was awarded to me; far from feeling like a summation, it feels to me like a landmark, a signpost of a continuing vocational, academic, and personal journey...one that I'm a good long ways into, for certain, but one that I will, hopefully, still have a while to work on and improve and grow larger and deeper yet. I'm a lucky man, and for all the rough passages along the roads I've biked over so far, I have to call myself blessed. For anyone who has read this far: thanks for being part of the ride.

Why The Cult of Smart is a Book for Every Parent in 2020 (Whether Anarcho-Socialist or Not)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

This past summer a book was published, with little fanfare, that made what was, in retrospect, an argument that millions of middle-class, public-schooling parents everywhere--my wife and I included--desperately needed to hear. The argument was, in essence: don't worry about your kids and the inconsistent online education they are likely receiving thanks to the pandemic; just remember that while teachers matter a great deal, and the information which teachers have to impart to our children matters as well, the actual structure of the "schooling" received by students really doesn't matter much at all, or at least not in the way most successful members of our society have come to believe.

That's an unfair and reductive description of Frederik deBoer's fine (if somewhat overlong and scattered) The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, but it's not fundamentally inaccurate. The primary target of deBoer's book is the American educational meritocracy and those who, because they benefit most from it, are among the last to see its harms, and thus who most frequently push hard against both common sense and scientific data in their efforts to keep it working. But in surveying all that aforementioned data, and explaining how it reveals the very small role that certain types of formal education--however expensive or expert--ultimately play in expanding minds and developing talents, deBoer's attack on meritocratic elites also serves as a consolation to parents and caregivers worried about what their children, and students all across America, may be missing out on. As he writes at the end of his chapter on school quality--following paragraphs of delightfully vicious swipes at Harvard, Yale, and the Gates Foundation--even when we synthesize data from "more than a hundred studies over a 15-year period" looking at the "benefits of...afterschool programs, behavioral interventions, computer-assisted teaching, and more," the results are undeniable: "most things didn't work." He concludes that "[t]his is not an argument that school does not matter" (he notes, for example, the limited yet real impact that small group tutoring can have); rather, "it is instead a question of how school matters" (pp. 120-121). Hence the succor that can be found in The Cult of Smart: if online learning often seems to consist, at least in part, of far too many poorly delivered, incoherently received make-work assignments--and as a college professor myself, I assure you: I am entirely familiar with the pressures which have led struggling instructors around the world to arrive at these far from engaging assignments!--then rest easy; if you're still taking the time to help your kids out around the dinner table, then you're already doing the thing that matters most to their education anyway.

It is unfortunate that "doing homework at the dinner table" is so commonly--however inaccurately--coded as "conservative"; I promise you (again, speaking from personal experience) that left-leaning parents make use of such family schooling traditions just as much of right-leaning ones do. Still, perhaps that coding was inevitable. All through last year, it was solely conservative media outlets which gave deBoer's book any attention; reviews of the book--all of which praised different parts of his argument, if not the whole thing--appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and the Washington Examiner. It's possible that deBoer--a self-described revolutionary socialist, and a writer who has an equal reputation for thoughtfulness and contrariness--takes some pleasure from being ignored or misunderstood by his own ideological compatriots, but missing his provocative claims is a loss for the American left. It's also possible that, on some deep, inarticulate level, these conservative outlets thought deBoer's book was worth engaging with because the reviewers recognized in it some parallel with Ivan Illich's anarchist classic Deschooling Society, which they learned about from some hippies that sneaked into a home-schooling conference they attended once. In all likelihood, though, none of the above applies; rather, the more likely answer is that the media outlets which took the book seriously were those who like running features that challenge, as they see it, the aims of public education, and the media outlets which dislike challenging the those premises didn't. (In the interests of full disclosure, let it be known that earlier versions of this review were submitted by me to Dissent, Jacobin, and The Nation, all without success--which may be a reflection of the quality of my writing, but I suspect there is more to it than that.

The one extensive exception to this (and boy, is it ever extensive) came from Nathan J. Robinson of the very left-leaning Current Affairs, who wrote a massive, purposefully exhausting response to The Cult of Smart, claiming in essence that it is correct both that the right has looked positively upon the book and that the left has ignored it, since deBoer's arguments, according to Robinson, embrace the same racist assumptions which Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray infamously wove into their arguments over a quarter-century ago in The Bell Curve, only repurposing their old genetic judgments about the heritability of intelligence for anti-meritocratic ends. Robinson’s overlong effort to bury his earlier, pre-publication enthusiasm for deBoer’s book is, I think, almost entirely mistaken. The Cult of Smart, despite its flaws, does have something distinct to contribute to the development of a socialist vision of education--and, in that such a vision exists in opposition to that which is presumed by our liberal meritocratic bureaucracies, to a localist, even anarchist, vision of education as well. While it is fair to push back against some of the ideas which deBoer’s consideration of cognitive science leads him to, his is absolutely a left (maybe left conservative?) argument, and not a repackaging of Herrnstein and Murray. The challenges which cognitive psychology and neuroscience have already posed to numerous fields--education in particular--will not go away any time soon; leftists and anarchists and localists of all stripes, so long as they accept that education is a public good, need an appropriate framework to develop the sorts of answers to those challenges which will advance their ideals. DeBoer’s book, whatever its limitations, is an excellent place to start doing so, granting it a value far beyond simply reminding parents like my wife and I not to worry too much about what their daughters may have missed out on as their teachers struggled to make physical education, forensics, and culinary arts classes work online.

DeBoer’s primary two-part thesis is simple. First, he asserts that the role which genetic differences play in any given person’s cognitive ability and academic inclinations, while not determinative in any final sense--as deBoer writes in his introduction, “the relationship between genes and behavioral traits is neither perfect nor fixed; environment does matter, to a varying degree, and there are interventions that can ameliorate some of the impact of genes” (p. 23), a caveat which Robinson seems to have missed entirely--ought to accepted as a matter of policy. But second, he notes that as much as we may causally acknowledge the ordinary reality of these differences, the “cult of smart” prevents us from fully accepting these differences for what they are. Instead, we find ourselves institutionally driven to maximize access to the meritocracy of contemporary life, telling ourselves that education--assuming the opportunity for such can somehow, someday, finally be fully guaranteed to all--will be the great equalizer. But as any educator who looks at the data honestly can tell you, that is always, at best, a partial truth. What deBoer sees, not unreasonably, as the denial of this fact simply infuriates him: “The Cult of Smart, for the people who excel within it, is more than a political platform or a vision of success. It is a totalizing ideology that colors everything they buy, say, and do” (p. 32).

All of the debates about educational outcomes which deBoer introduces in the early chapters are controversial, and his approach to them is often uneven. Still, deBoer’s slaying of various cows sacred to the education establishment in America is kind of a delight. It’s hard to deny that progressive efforts to make schools both more effective and more egalitarian have often relied upon data which only masks how much the results of America’s unequally funded education system often simply entrench income inequality. Similarly, it is clear that many articulations of equality of opportunity implicitly posit students as “blank slates,” ready to compete, which only increases the pressures on both students and teachers to come up with evidence to prove to legislators and donors the supposedly transformative outcomes of learning. As much as more than few philosophical liberals--of both progressive and conservative varieties--may be loath to admit it, our reluctance to be honest about differences in natural academic talent (in contrast to our uncomplicated acceptance of most differences in natural athletic or artistic talent, which are generally seen as obvious) does seem to be a contributor to our constant expensive experiments with school quality, test scores, teacher accountability, and more, giving us along the way such arguable misfires as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and various other “ed-tech boondoggles,” in deBoer’s wonderful phrase.

It is the book's middle which gets to the meat of the argument, however: the “heritability of academic ability,” and consequently the very real possibility that “the range of the possible in the classroom is dramatically smaller than conventionally assumed....[with a] large portion of the variation in academic outcomes...remain[ing] permanently out of the hands of schools and teachers” (p. 121). Robinson sees this claim as a criminal reduction of the always unknown potential lurking in the relationship between students and their environment, or even students and their past selves. But even if deBoer’s examples aren’t always as careful as they could be, his presentation of the science around them is succinct and clear. His efficient summary of numerous studies in behavioral genetics, as well as critiques of those studies, leads to the carefully stated conclusion that “the impact of genetic ancestry on human behavioral traits seems indisputable” (p. 137). Despite his penchant for picking fights, deBoer is uncharacteristically sympathetic to the challenge which this information puts to those who have fought so long for what they generally accepted as the true "ideal" of public education (simplistically put, that literally any student can achieve literally anything they put their mind to) but neither does that understanding cause him to pull back:

It’s understandable...that many progressive people have decided to wash their hands of the topic of genetics and intelligence altogether. Understandable, but disturbing. Disturbing because by avoiding these subjects, good people have essentially ceded the conversation to bad....I believe that we can engage in the fight against bigotry in all forms while acknowledging the overwhelming evidence that intelligence, like all cognitive traits, is significantly influenced by genetic parentage. In fact, we need to do to so....[W]e need to separate a belief in claims about individual genetic difference from claims about group genetic differences. Through grappling with the data, we can craft better arguments against those who would misuse it to advance their racist and sexist agendas. Or we can ignore the data, dismiss the subject entirely, cede the field to the worst people imaginable, and suffer the consequences (pp. 140-141).

What, in deBoer’s view, are those better arguments? Central to them is a recognition of how the meritocracy, and its roots in a libertarian reading of the equality of opportunity, should have no place is any actually democratic public school system. DeBoer makes good use of John Rawls’s concept of the “veil of ignorance” as a tool for intellectually justifying the creation of a social contract--and, for that matter, a public school system--where we shape circumstances without any cognizance of our natural assets, abilities, or intelligence. As a socialist, though, he goes beyond Rawls’s assumption that a redistributive principle can ameliorate the differences which will nonetheless result from the purely opportunistic (and thus invariably luck-influenced) choices in our resulting lives, and instead suggests that our insights into cognitive differences should point us away from the glorification of equality of opportunity entirely. In the educational sphere especially, “opportunity” is often tied to specific academic measurements, which different people with different genetic traits, insofar as deBoer's argument points, can probably never realistically give full and equal consent to. Consequently, the aim of education should instead be to accommodate the widest possible range of dispositions among students. The goal should be empowerment and plurality, rather than equality and uniformity.

That many educators already know this, and have leaned hard in its direction in the midst of the pandemic-related disruptions experienced in many of the (perhaps sometimes too restrictive) patterns which govern much public school teaching, is important to emphasize. And it is something parents like myself have needed to hold onto as well: the idea that the ability of kids is variable, as is the number of paths open to them, and that such variability will not be much changed by however much schooling itself changes (or, sometimes, simply fails). While any number of civic goods or socializing experiences might be more tied to one particular form of public education or another, whatever empowering academic potential which schooling itself has almost certainly is not. 

These realizations and experiences do not on their own, however, amount to an alternative--a leftist, localist, or anarcho-socialist alternative--to deBoer's "equality of opportunity" canard. While I think deBoer is correct that it is a misunderstanding of classic Marxist thought to enshrine “equality” as a central socialist goal, he doesn’t do enough in the book’s final chapters to really develop what alternatives to it would involve. This is unfortunate. DeBoer’s exploration of diverse reforms (including the intriguing suggestion that compulsory schooling end and children be allowed to drop out of school after age 12--something which more that a few parents dealing with pandemic-related school closings probably think they've already experienced!), as part of his drive to undermine the Cult of Smart and “save us from our smart-kids-take-all economy” (p. 227), are thoughtful but hardly systematic. By failing to more consistently consider the character of a truly socialist and pluralistic education model, and instead engaging in yet another attack on charter schools (as well as a passing swipe at the anti-communism of Michael Harrington and the Democratic Socialists of America), deBoer doesn’t provide a theoretical structure to support his conclusion: that the aim to “achieve [academic] equality of any meaningful kind is to deny our nature,” while using education to recognize that “we have fundamentally different abilities and talents...is the first step in [our] liberation” (p. 239).

Here, deBoer's arguments can be fruitfully compared with a similarly radical attack on our educational meritocracy from two decades ago, one which lacks deBoer's insight into cognitive research (and his accidental pandemic relevance!), but which shares his radical passions. In 2000, Michael W. Apple, a well-known Marxist educator and scholar, published Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (a second edition came out in 2006). It was a furious broadside against what he called “conservative modernization,” which philosophically was a misnomer, since what he was attacking was the neoliberal meritocracy, not anything actually conservative, properly speaking. But whatever the best label for the interest groups and educational entrepreneurs and reformers who crowded around the Bush I and Clinton administrations, Apple saw them all as blaming the lack of educational accomplishment in American public education on the supposedly stifling uniformity and secularity of the schools themselves. Their proposed solutions, as he saw them, involved undermining both teachers unions and the traditional (and, from our perspective today, distinctly non-high-tech) standards-enforcing bureaucracies which those unions had complicated opinions about, and replacing both with various market-based and localizable educational options (charter schools, public school vouchers, religious schools, home schooling, etc.) which would use cultural and economic competition (serviced by centralized corporate interests, to be sure) to generate excellence.

Needless to say, Apple found all of this appalling. But he also recognized that the ideas contained within this movement connected with the hopes and fears of many parents. To counter that connection, a new and "truly public school ideal" needed to adopt “a somewhat more populist set of impulses,” including “tactical alliances” with distinct religious, linguistic, and cultural groups, such as might be best served by properly constructed--that is, genuinely community-based, as opposed to corporately astroturfed--charter schools, or whatever else might best enable educators to respect “the cultures, histories, and experiences of these students and their parents and local communities.” The point being that, in confronting what he saw as a profound threat to the democratic possibilities of public education in America, Apple's socialist suggestions made room for difference and proceeded to think about how to make available to all something that needed to be shaped differently for all. (Educating the “Right” Way, pp. 100, 224-226, 228-229).

Apple's arguments are two-decades old, but the concepts they reflect--like the mature thought of Michael Harrington's anti-bureaucratic decentralist socialism, in fact--are relevant to the arguments which deBoer engages. Harrington, like many other socialist theorists, came to acknowledge that a truly democratic socialization of the economy--and, it seems reasonable to assume, of public education as well--would be the exact opposite of the totalizing meritocracy which we have today and which deBoer rightly condemns. Instead, it would partake of something almost republican in the civic sense: that is, distinct and at least partly autarkic communities of learning, work, leisure, and political participation. DeBoer touches on one aspect of this idea briefly, when he insightfully points out that the progressive reliance upon decreasing social mobility in America to attack income inequality is actually an implicit licensing of the disruption and meritocratic sorting--in other words, the “mobility”--which generates so much inequality in the first place (p. 156). But his insight that mobility (moving to find the best school district! competing to hire the best teachers!) is at best orthogonal, if not in some ways actually in opposition, to a genuinely egalitarian educational environment, is never connected to the larger theoretical question of a model that sustains people in all their various different creations of the good life in the places they are. Given deBoer’s rejection of any form of the charter school idea which Apple saw as potentially a component in a populist front against supposedly-free-but-actually-corporatized educational “reforms” (assuming that such charters could be designed around a difficult balance of non-discrimination and real local pluralism, rather than around fake promises of efficient, competition-driven results), it would at least have been good to see deBoer present other alternatives for building a truly differentiated public schooling movement--like the formal enlistment of home schooling, or attaching educational institutions to local guilds of apprenticeships, perhaps. (Something for those 12-year-olds who, having learned the basics of reading and writing, dropped out!)

I don't want to condemn deBoer’s book for failing to flesh out all its own theoretical parameters and implications. The Cult of Smart is deeply entrenched in most modern systems of public education around the world, and the increasingly clear reality of cognitive and genetic differences between different human beings poses not just a practical challenge to educators committed to giving everyone an idealistically equal opportunity to prove their merit, but also a painfully sharp one to some liberals whose membership in the Cult makes them want to deny this reality entirely, since it threatens the usual justifications of the meritocracy which gave them the positions they enjoy. By forcing his readers to recognize the Cult for what it is, and why neuroscience and behavioral genetics should be opportunities for critics of the meritocracy--whether from a socialist or a localist or yet some other ideological direction--to make the case for an education that empowers rather than one which vainly strives to homogenize, deBoer has performed an important service. And, not incidentally, as 2020 draws to a close, he has given parents and caregivers obsessing over what their students may be missing out on something different to worry about. As an educator myself, I want to do the best I can in terms of teaching my students. But it's helpful, as I close the books on the fall 2020 semester, to be reminded, as this book does implicitly, of something that every teacher and parent ought to remember as well: that basically, more often than not, the kids, in all their variety and abilities and interests, are, and likely always will be, pretty much all right.

Thoughts on Friendship

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of 'Mormonism'; [it is designed] to revolutionize and civilize the world, and cause wars and contentions to cease and men to become friends and brothers....Friendship is like Brother [Theodore] Turley in his blacksmith shop welding iron to iron; it unites the human family with its happy influence.

Or so Joseph Smith, the founder of my religious tradition, was recorded as saying on July 23, 1843. To my mind, it's heavy doctrine--and the fact that I take his claims about friendship so seriously has been on my mind lately, for a variety of reasons.

For starters, I would bet that just about everyone who happens to read this is likely connected to a particular web of online associations which, thanks to the power of capitalist branding, has gotten away with labeling everyone involved in its operations as "friends" (and we keep using that term, even though some research shows that most of your Facebook friends are anything but). The influence of this technologically enabled shift in our social perspective is so great that the Powers That Be behind it can just make up "Friend Day" holidays, one of which probably popped up on your FB page just yesterday, like it did mine--and based on clicks, people appear willing to go along with it.

Of course, some of you have escaped the tentacles of Facebook. If so, you have my admiration. But Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and so much more (blogs included!) inundate us nonetheless. And all of it, no matter what the honest exchange of information or entertainment or empathy or interest they enable, nonetheless depending upon a virtual simulacrum of friendship, as a substitute (and, sometimes, a replacement) of the real thing.

This semester, I'm teaching an honors seminar focusing on technology, and I started out the class by giving my students three open-ended questions that relate to various technology-related issues, one having to do with jobs, one having to do with teaching, and one having to do with social media. Nearly every student chose the social media topic, and nearly every one of them said the same thing--that while they'd never give up their phones, they were pretty certain technology had made them more frustrated, more lonely, and more isolated. (A couple of students went so far as to describe themselves as "trapped" by their phones and all the attendant expectations and norms that come with them.)

As it happened, a cool, off-beat, local Christian organization here in Wichita, the Eighth Day Institute, hosted just this past weekend a symposium titled "Friendship in a Fractured Age"; the keynote speaker was Ken Myers, of Mars Hill Audio, and the main theme of his address was  "Social Media and the Commodification of Friendship." I shared with him the anecdote from my class, and in response he shared some other research and surveys he had access to which showed such attitudes aren't rare. The kids aren't dumb, my fellow Gen Xers and Baby-Boomers and even older folks; they know that, at least in some ways, at least some of the time, they are relying upon social media platforms and tech companies and buzz phrases to create the sort of memorable, personal, intimate, tactile connections and friendships which they've learned all about from us, from their parents, from television programs and movies and books, all of which celebrated friendships...and are often finding, unfortunately, that the commodified substitutes of the day just don't do the trick.

Don't believe these weird, Wendell-Berry-reading conservative Christians? Well, then how about former president Barack Obama? In the first episode of David Letterman's new Netflix show, Obama talked for a while about social media, which his 2008 campaign for the White House depended heavily upon, but which has now shown us not only how the increasingly sophisticated algorithms those social media platforms employ can easily generate and entrench "completely different information universes," but also how "people in power, special interests, foreign governments, etc." can essentially set the terms for how so many of us judge what to believe and whom to trust. I suppose one could argue that this sort of prostitution and manipulation of the human desire for knowledge and belonging and friendship has been going on as long as any kind of print or electronic media has existed; it's not like fake news or the pre-internet versions of catfishing and bullying and all the rest didn't exist before the invention of phones that we can carry around in our pockets. But all the same, to assume that if one can point out antecedents to contemporary distrust, tribalism, and alienation, that therefore there is no reason to think contemporary complaints about such can possibly represent something genuinely new and threatening to what Joseph Smith was talking about is, I suspect, profoundly wrong.

At the very least, the fact that friendship, its range or quality or absence, is something much talked about today is undeniable. (Within my own Mormon tribe, the discussion has been near constant for a while now.) Ken Myers, at the conclusion to his presentation, reminded us all of the promise of scripture that someday we would see God and one another "face to face," and that the friendship Jesus Himself offers all His disciples is tied to "speaking plainly, and using no figure of speech"--which, I would warrant, doesn't include emojis. Myers expressed his fear that our overwhelmingly--and, increasingly, our economically mandated--networked and wired world would lead those who move through it (namely, all of us) to form their hopes, their expectations, and their faith completely separate from that beautiful vision. In a small way, I suspect that endless the social media-driven arguments I mentioned above over who can be a friend to whom are at least partly shaped by this loss of the face-to-face.

Count yourself lucky if you don't know what I'm talking about. The FB friend, the Tweet responder, the anonymous e-mailer, all of whom wonder how you could possibly support that cause, or forward that article, or agree with that comment, when this other perspective on that cause, or this other reading of that article, or this other context for that comment, clearly shows its ugliness, its violence, its self-loathing, its incoherence, its immorality, its Trump-supporting awfulness. Can't you see this is anti-Christian? Can't you see this is racist? Can't you see this targets that group, this undermines that principle, this excludes that obvious and necessary truth? How can you call yourself a Mormon/an American/a leftist/a decent human being while you tolerate such nonsense? What kind of monster are you anyway?

In my experience, in the midst of such faceless back-and-forths (which, I state for the record, I actually kind of like, because I dig arguments, and because I usually fail to recognize if something has become poisonous until long after it became such), saying that you know the author or the situation personally, that you've talked with them face-to-face, that you've spent time and sweat into engaging with these issues, that you've broken bread and been silly and personal and private with all of the above, and thus can't quite accept the reductive accusations about these individuals and movements being tossed around, rarely makes much difference. And, of course, maybe it shouldn't (the curt "so what if they're nice people? Hitler liked puppies too"-style of response is kind of silly, but not without a point). But more than I fear for the loneliness of my students, or for the stress of juggling multiple Facebook friends groups, I fear that the absence of the personal, the intimate, the tactile, the face-to-face in our friendships is resulting in a shrinking and contorting of our ability to feel love for our fellow human beings. When the first thing we learn about a person, or the thing about them which most consistently comes through our algorithms and screens, is that they participated in the Women's March (and therefore are pink-hat-wearing, religion-hating, exclusionary SJWs) or that they like some Republican candidate (and therefore are gay-bashing, theocracy-building, white supremacist Trump supporters), the narrowing and maximizing and personal-difference-and-nuance-crushing logic of our electronic tribes is only strengthens.

It isn't uncommon, I think, for people who hold to Christian teachings to insist that you can keep these different tracks separate, and hence that our ability to exercise love--meaning charity or agape--towards all our fellow human beings isn't undermined when we also willingly cultivate (or passively allow our commodified arts of "friendship" to cultivate for us) a complete loathing of everything this particular segment (or segments) of our fellow human beings say or do or affirm. Call it just the latest iteration of the whole deceptively simple "hate the sin, love the sinner" nonsense. It is nonsense with a long pedigree in Christian thinking. Kierkegaard, among others, said Christians shouldn't be bothered by mere friendship, or presumably or the lack of it; in his view philia, that form of love which is fundamentally characterized by freedom and partiality (we choose to be friends with this person, but not that one; we choose to be loyal to our friend; if the friendship comes to an end, it's because we choose it), was essentially pagan, and an unworthy companion to the rigorous (and admittedly, sometimes de-humanizing) universality of Christian charity.

At the Eighth Day symposium, there was also a presentation given by Protopresbyter Paul D. O'Callaghan, from St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral here in Wichita. He's written a short, fine little book, The Feast of Friendship, which makes a solid case--drawing upon Bible stories, the Patristic tradition, personal observations, and a great deal of philosophy and psychology--for seeing in our human ability to choose to make and maintain particular, partial friendships, even (perhaps even especially) in the midst of great differences, something holy. He writes:

Fundamentally, genuine friends grant us access to the most creative dimensions of our souls by receiving us and reflecting us back to ourselves. In this way, we are able to see what could not be seen before. We encounter our own identity and possibilities in fresh and dynamic ways. We can act in a manner previously unthinkable to us. Friends liberate our own inner resources for God's disposal, and thus are channels for the mediation of his grace to us (p. 96).

And also:

To answer Kierkegaard: yes, in this world, the practice of unrequited agape is essential to the Christian life. But one cannot survive on agape alone. We share vital loves within our families, and in addition to that, the philia between friends deepens and enriches love's place in our lives. It does not matter if it is experienced within the confines of the fixed social hierarchies of traditional societies or in the fluid and free associations characteristic of modern Western culture. Friendships realize the vital communion of love given and received (p. 125).

O'Callaghan's modified defense of modernity in that last passage should indicate that it's not as though the only sort of friendship which he thinks ought to be considered acceptable to concerned Christians is one untouched by technological tools of connection. (Both he and Ken Myers, when I saw them at the conference, both had smartphones, for whatever that's worth.) The more important point, I think, is that the freedom which characterizes real--not fake--friendship, can withstand all sorts of diversions and differences. (Even, I should note, gender differences; while O'Callaghan is quite traditional in his thinking about sexuality and sexual morality, and appropriately so, he has little sympathy for the "fundamentalist" notion that women and men can't choose to be friends; he writes that such rigidity denies "the essential primacy of the person, created in the image and likeness of God"--p. 109.) To confront those differences, to see and know and come to enjoy the association with the actual human being or the actual living organization that generates those perspectives from which we differ or experience challenges or even suffer embarrassment is part, I think, of the process by which God opens up ourselves to ourselves, thus teaching us better just what our capacity to feel charity both towards our friends and our enemies (and, I suppose, our frenemies in between) really is. But it must be a real friendship, I think, one grounded in, or at the very least characterized by, our lived-in, and not wholly mediated, materiality.

Like every good Generation Xer, I was taught by They Might Be Giants that, at some point, the racism--or the anti-Mormonism, or the homophobia, or the classicism, or the Trump-defending, or the insistence upon any number of other perceived slights and/or genuine evils--might become so explicit, so indicting, that you need to rethink the partiality by which you choose to view the person or cause or idea that you feel affection for. "Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding" isn't wrong. But note, in closing, that the context of that song, and the point of decision it describes, the realization that one's friend really is a devil, is an actual, bodily experienced party. Not a chat room, not an FB group, not an e-mail chain, not a Tweetstorm, but an actual, face-to-face encounter, with actual "bobbing and pretending," hearing words actually spoken complete with their whole history and their body language and their social cues along with them. The friendship Smith praises was liked to welding iron to iron--which means a real physical unity, a real handling of the different shapes of iron in hand, with real heat applied to see if their edges can come together. Nothing virtual there. Maybe if we kept ideal as our rule of thumb, and sought for such whenever and however we can, if only as a necessary supplement to all the other wired connections in our lives, then perhaps the twin poles of alienation and extremism might lessen in force, and our confusion over the holiness of simple friendships could be a little lessened as well.

The Future of (Education at Places Like) Friends

It's simply a glorious October day here at Friends University--blue sky, light wind, temps in the 60s, the leaves of the trees (as I take in their colors through the windows of my third story office) are a mix of green, yellow, orange, and brown. This morning I raced a train on my bike to the crossing on Meridian on the west side of the Friends campus--trains are notoriously slow moving through Wichita, and I didn't want to be stuck there waiting for 10 minutes--and beat it by less than 40 yards. A good omen for the day, I hope.

We're officially inaugurating a new president here at Friends University today (though President Carey has been on the job since last July), and there are faculty showcases and tent displays and much pomp all around our small but (I think) beautiful campus here on the west side of Wichita, KS. I have a hopeful feeling today--though I'm sure the weather and my small bicycling triumph this morning, not to mention the fact that I've worked like crazy to get ahead on all the stuff piling up on my desk, have a lot to do with that. I think, though, that our new president, and a sensibility that feels rather new to be me as well--a sensibility that seems more realistic, more aware and accepting and determined in regards to the difficulties ahead--have something to do with that sense of hope as well.

It's been a rough few years here at Friends, and the rough years are going to continue for at least a few more years, that's certain. President Carey will be my third university president in the 9 1/2 years I've been here; like so many small liberal arts colleges (though Friends, with its small number of graduate and professional programs, prefers to style itself a "university," it's really a SLAC, and those who insist otherwise are just fooling themselves, I think), we're struggling to figure out how to survive as the traditional pool of students interested in small, mostly locally oriented, mostly religiously and/or academically homogeneous and focused, and generally rather expensive private institutions like ourselves disappears. Community colleges are less expansive, large state institutions (which are scrambling for students themselves, in the face of state and federal cut-backs) have more scholarship money to offer, and online programs claim (not always honestly, but nonetheless often persuasively) to have job placement rates that exceed anything we can promise. Particularly in this part of the country, where ethnic groups and religious bodies in distant farming towns all across the state historically pulled together to build colleges throughout the 19th and early 20th century (Kansas has nearly 20 schools that fit that description), there's a lot of scrambling and hard thinking--and painful changes--taking place. Here's hoping that, one way or another, the good work that I think we do here at Friends will be able to survive.

In the Democratic presidential debate this past Tuesday, Bernie Sanders--whom I've made clear I like a lot--said that going to college in America ought to be like going to high school: that is, free and universally available. (Specifically, he said: "This is the year 2015. A college degree today is the equivalent of what a high school degree was 50 years ago. And what we said 50 years ago and a hundred years ago is that every kid in this country should be able to get a high school education regardless of the income of their family. I think we have to say that is true for everybody going to college.") This led to a fair amount of discussion among various friends of mine--some of whom, obviously, criticized it as a massively expensive change to an already massively complicated higher education system, but others who, I think rightly, wondered about the deeper point: shouldn't we actually be encouraging people to find alternatives to college, rather than making it more and more possible to every single American to get onto the same meritocratic track?

This is something I've wondered on and off about for close to a quarter-century. On the one hand, it's undeniably true that "the academy"--the place where specialized education in the arts and sciences take place--can't help but be a somewhat elite enterprise. As I put it long ago, to pretend there aren't, or there shouldn't be, boundaries regarding who participates in and who is best suited for a university education is simply in denial about the whole justificatory structure of the enterprise, which (as I wrote over 10 years ago), depends upon people like myself who have been "highly educated, socialized to frame problems and discuss ideas in rarefied ways, and schooled to form expectations and think in terms of certain relationships and opportunities that are, frankly, the province of a leisurely, guild-protected elite." But at the same time, I resist strongly the idea that this structure requires a whole-hearted embrace of the aristocratic mindset which for centuries was its natural concomitant; global capitalism and the democratization of society have both so leveled our conceptions of the worlds we move through that standing firm on the idea that some particular sort of learning requires taking exclusivity as its premise strikes me a both ridiculous and unsustainable. Too much good has come from the spreading of knowledge and expertise and specialized, non-technical learning, I think, to want to embrace the complete re-aristocratization of post-secondary education, even if only indirectly (by kicking away all government subsidized loans, for example, despite the moral hazard they obviously present).

As a consequence, I listen to Senator Sanders, and I'm intrigued. Might it not be the case that the only way we can get back to apprenticeships and innovative local work and other routes to productive lives beyond professionalized, meritocratic races up capitalist staircases, is literally by taking money out of the equation (at least insofar of our own direct contributions as "buyers" of education, anyway)? Making higher education a free good might loosen up the demand for college by making people more willing to experiment with their time, in other words.

Does this have it backwards--is it, instead, the lure of college loans and other financial incentives which is discouraging such experimentation? Maybe. But it seems to me that the supposed "easy money" out there isn't there solely because of FAFSA; banks are delighted to get in on the game of financing (at long-term rates of interest) other people's dreams. One could respond by saying that such a prospect only became appealing to banks because government provides subsidies for them to do so--but that, I think, isn't so much an argument against Sanders's suggestion of tuition-free college as it is an argument against using redistributive means to accomplish the aims of affordable higher education for all when institutions of higher education are expected to turn a profit. It's basically the single-payer argument for health care reform, once again: are you going to use a kludgy collections of questionably constitutional laws and sweetheart deals with big insurance companies to essentially fake your way towards university health care, or do you just want to up and pay for it? As I tend to to believe that the socio-economic fears driving everyone to get their kids to college are probably permanent features of late capitalism, I think, rather than jury-rigging increasingly expensive ways to respond to those fears, maybe we should just take one of the contributing pressures off entirely.

Of course, if we take Senator Sanders's words literally, and the goal ought to be to turn higher education entirely into high school--that is, make not only free and universally available but also more or less compulsory--then we'd be missing out entirely on the opportunities for alternative flourishing that allowing for an ease of experimenting with different forms or approaches to higher education might provide, to both students and us faculty alike. (Experiments that have long been in evidence in many Western European countries, where free or nearly-so higher education is combined with an extensive system of testing which has encouraged, over the decades, the development of a multiplicity of vocational, technical, as well as professional routes to productive living.) So no: I don't want college to be like high school--I have too many students who act like it is already. But maybe, just maybe, knowing that college was a non- (or at least far less) burdensome option would help many of these students see that perhaps a middle-class or better life needn't be a college-diploma-or-nothing game. And, in seeing that, that in term might enable employers and government agencies adjust their social expectations accordingly. I suppose it's possible that allowing the whole system to collapse, and trust that home schooling will take its place, might achieve the same ends. But that would mean, among other things, that there wouldn't be very many liberal arts colleges like Friends left anymore, and the teaching we're able to do here would disappear. Selfishly speaking, I think that would be a loss. And, as I look around at the good work that is done by so many here, and the good ideas and high hopes which I feel around me on this day, I think: and maybe not so selfishly speaking, too.

A Semester of Teaching Sustainability

[Cross-Posted to Front Porch Republic]

The semester has come to an end here at Friends University, and students are leaving campus for their holiday break. Right now I'm grading, and while I have many tests to grade, none interest me quite as much as the exams turned in for "Simplicity and Sustainability" course which I taught for the second time this semester. I gave my students questions on the readings we've discussed--the writings of E.F. Schumacher, Herman Daly and John Cobb, and many others--but more importantly, I asked them to go beyond the questions, and use the essay portions of the exam to reflect upon alternative forms of social and economic organization. That was the focus on the course, after all--to consider, criticize, and comment upon the range of possibilities available to those who truly wish to make their livelihoods, their lifestyles, and their neighborhoods both simpler (meaning, most essentially, more readily available to and responsive to their own collective efforts, rather being dependent upon inaccessible systems beyond their reach) and more sustainable (that is, less exploitative of the resources, both human and natural, upon which all communities are built). That such possibilities are available is the primary reason why I teach this course, as well as try to bring similar insights into as many different classes I teach as possible. While I love taking students out to visit local farmers and producers (as the above sign, kindly provided by Phil and Lucy Nisly, one of the great localists I've gotten to know here in south-central Kansas, plainly shows)--some alternatives are much closer (both in distance, and in terms of social and economic change) than that.

Early in the semester, I stopped by the Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, and spent a while familiarizing myself with some of the work which this decade-old organization--a non-profit corporation which works with local businesses, developers, and government agencies, using money raised through a mutual improvement district which all the downtown business pay into--thinks about making a mid-sized city like Wichita more sustainable. There's actually been a fair amount of activity on this front; Wichita, KS, was chosen as one of the cities which the Urban Sustainability Accelerator, a program at Portland State University, would focus on turning 2013-2014, with plans to bring together various actors to get ideas (and funds) generated to push forward more green and more localized development in some key parts of our city. This led, in turn, to city planners and transportation experts from various local organizations and government agencies to visit the class, and lay out what concerns them most. Some major worries: include that cities like Wichita--like too many other mid-sized cities--suffer from an inferiority complex of sorts, such that home developers can almost always count on city officials to throw in "special assessments" to lure home developers to expand their footprint and keep housing costs relatively low; that the expansive footprint of the city contributes to an overemphasis on continually develop and expand our primarily roadways, assuming that such suburbanization is the only viable model for holding on to our labor pool, thus making it ever harder to push the city itself in the direction of bicycling, walkability, or mass transit; and that, for all these reasons (not to mention several that are probably somewhat particular to the political culture of this part of Kansas), the very word "sustainability" moves even non-Tea Party types to immediately think in hysterical terms of socialist government planning, rampaging secularism, and the United Nations taking over the country. So some other term is necessary to clear the air (I'm told that folks down in Waco, TX, dealing with similar paranoid resistance to citizens organizing themselves to promote local goods through planning, have come to speak solely of "stewardship" or "creation care." Whatever works, I guess.)

When looking at moving such a large entity--and of course, the largeness of even a city like Wichita depends upon one's frame of reference--as Wichita in a "simplifying" direction, you need to begin from below, as well as above. And so we also continued the on-again, off-again conversation which we've had here at Friends for a while about a community garden. Rebecca McMahon--whose expertise as a county extension agent is hardly elitist, but rather very much part of the effort to get all of us more engaged in our own food supply--made two visits to Friends University, to talk with us about various strategies. With the input of the nearby Northfield School, and the example of some other local gardeners, with any luck a few of us, students and staff and faculty, are moving towards adding a small but sustainable contributor to Friends University's local ecosystem--and giving our local community greater opportunity to get back to the earth at the same time.

If there was any single overriding theme to our class this semester, it was the question of scale--whether working from the bottom or the top, we have to be able to think clearly about what is about the social and economic organizations that we focused upon which we wanted to simplify, or make more sustainable. When is tending to the local the proper route to take, and when is taking broad and radical stands? And can you do both at once? Bill McKibben, the famed environmentalist, author, and challenger of our all-growth-all-the-time economy, argues in his latest book that you can. As for myself, I'm not sure--though it may be that, in out globalized world, you can't effectively choose not to. Certainly that was the point McKibben made when he visited Watermark Books here in Wichita this semester--the local (in his case, learning to keep bees) has been utterly changed by national and international forces rampaging across the planet, and so nothing less than equally broad and radical actions--which McKibben, a retiring and bookish person at heart, has found himself spearheading through his 350.Org campaign--are called for. I and several of my students went to hear him speak, and I can't deny: he's a persuasive man, who wants people to understand that we need to simplify and scale back the entire global oil economy, if we want to keep our communities sustainable in the long run.

McKibben probably isn't wrong--but neither is his radicalism particularly hopeful, or joyful. And what is the point of living a life that is more local and more truly one's own, if such simplification doesn't bring any more joy and contentment into your life? Which is why I was grateful, once again, to be able to make use of the wisdom and generosity of multiple farmers and producers near Wichita, most especially the Hershberger family, Leroy and his parents, who have opened up their home multiple times to these "Local Food Tours" that I organize. The comfort, pride, and love that they have for their particular place--the farmland of Reno County, and the Amish, Mennonite, and other Christian folk that have grown up in (or have left and then later returned) to that place to work the land and trade with and teach one another--is reflected in their language, their families, the attachments, and not least their food. (Who knew that butternut squash pie could taste so fine? I certainly didn't.) Repeatedly through our tour that day, we were taught, by word and by example, that the quest for greater personal and collective responsibility over those things which are most properly one's own--food, shelter, family, livelihood, community, and so forth--is one which requires constant "tendance," to use a term which the political theorist Sheldon Wolin developed long ago: one must become deeply familiar with, and committed to, ones limits, and think about what needs to be done in accordance with them. How to make use of this land? How best to raise these chickens? How can I adapt to specializing in a different crop? How can I pass this down to my children, and their children after them? How can I prevent myself, as I make decisions about schooling and budgeting and my faith life, from being "encumbered" by this world? This requires time, memory, and affection. Wendell Berry calls it "local knowledge," and the people who we visited, particularly the Hershbergers, clearly had it in spades. It is unlikely that anyone who takes seriously a more or less agrarian way of life can truly be without such. And yet, for all the legitimate reasons we might have to be suspicious of ever-expanding and ever-complicating logic of urban life, it would be wrong to say that city planners and gardening experts and transportation designers that visited my class were without such knowledge as well. True, they may not have been deeply focused on building an alternative form of social and economic organization, but they surely did have an often quite intimate grasp of the urban and environmental issue which face Wichita's residents, one that can only come from tending to a place--and as such, they may well be capable of asking the sorts of questions about sustainability and scale that, I think at least (and hopefully at least some of my class thinks as well), need to be asked.

The great problem which always faces any attempt to talk about--much less teach a class about!--how recognizing psychological, economic, and environmental limits may enable us to think less technologically, and more holistically, about slowing down and simplifying and making ours a more sustainable way of life, is the tendency to want more than "tendance" as a support for our efforts. More than "merely" tending to one's garden, we wish to deal with the larger threats to said garden. And we need to! But of course, any departure from our place to addressing larger issues is inevitably reductive of the place we've left--and reductivity is exactly the wrong kind of simplicity that we should seek. Real local, sustainable knowledge is diverse and changing, like the natural world: its simplicity comes in our structuring our lives and vocations to be near it, not in methodological homogenizing of it from afar. There is no simple answer here--real simplicity, the kind that can make for a more secure and joyful life, remains a pretty complicated affair. I'm grateful, though, that some continue to seek it--and by so doing, help me and my student learn more about the choices that we face, in an ever-more pressing fashion, each and every day.

Why Do I Keep Creating Libertarians?

Just to be clear: I know my title is an exaggeration. I don't "create" libertarians, or anything really, as a university teacher (not even always, as much as I wish otherwise, adequately educated American citizens). When it comes to matters of political opinion and ideology, I am, at most, just another component in my students' ongoing socialization and self-creation. Still, it remains a source of puzzlement to me. While I've become friendlier to certain sorts of left-libertarianism over the years, I've never pretended--to my students, here on my blog, or anywhere--that my own preferred political position was anything but a communitarian, populist, Laschian, localist, Toryish Left. But if that's so (just to play along with the--probably hopeless naive--belief that I as a college professor actually substantively contribute to the choices my students make), how is it that some--not all, to be sure, but over the years, much more than a few--of the best and brightest and hardest working students that I have taught here at Friends have been inspired to form Young Americans for Liberty chapters, or traveled to conferences to receive activist training in support of libertarian causes, or gotten involved in presenting the message of free markets throughout our community, or are currently looking forward to careers in academia or business with the concern for individual liberty at the forefront?

I can think of a few possible explanations:

1) I am actually a superbly effective and open-minded professor, who does nothing but expose my students to the world of ideas and encourage them to critically pursue what they think to be best--and a bunch of them have just happened to decide that libertarianism is what's best.

I'd actually love to believe this is true, but it's kind of conceited, and not particularly entertaining to contemplate. (Not the least reason being that I can't convince myself that the final clause there is at all accurate.)

2) I actually do attempt to indoctrinate my students, and really do put my opinions forward as the obvious truth, but I'm such a lousy teacher and clumsy indoctrinator that most of my attempts at brainwashing have completely backfired.

Related to this would be:

3) I actually do attempt to indoctrinate my students, and I'm relatively good at it, yet what I'm trying to instill in their brains is so obviously convoluted, wishy-washy, and ultimately incoherent that they wish, in response, to embrace the most streamlined and direct ideology around.

This explanation has the advantage of being compatible with a large percentage of all the commentary I've ever received from friends and online interlocutors about my politics, as pretty much every one of the 27 or so people who have ever unfortunately exposed themselves to my rants over the years can confirm.

4) What am I surprised about anyway? Opposition to government programs in America today has never been higher; nearly a quarter of the American people consider themselves libertarian in one sense or another; it's practically a "libertarian moment" out there right now. So what's the big deal?

I don't know if I find this explanation comforting or not, but I do find it the most intriguing. I'm teaching students about politics and government and law at a moment when the basic legitimacy of each and every one of them is being challenged (often lazily and ignorantly, it is true, but still, sincerely) as broadly as ever before in my lifetime. So perhaps I should see it as something of a triumph that a fair number of genuinely smart and committed students that I've been able to teach have taken some of what I've opened up to them and found within it a cause to engage matters of public life, rather than simply disengage in boredom and disgust. (Though there are many who do that too.) I suppose it's that sort of reasoning which lead me--when my students had done the work and came to me with their proposal--to agree to serve as the faculty sponsor (meaning: I'm the one who signs the bureaucratic forms) for their local YAL chapter. Sure, I'd kind of rather it be it be a chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists or the Greens, but at least they're not withdrawing: rather, they're making arguments, and that's something I can respect, and want to encourage.

Besides, I've discovered in talking often with my libertarian students--as they good-naturedly push back against my asking them to read John Maynard Keynes or Bill McKibben in the classroom--that the libertarianism and constitutionalism which animates many of them isn't just a chip off the Koch Brothers' block. Their deep suspicion of government systems extends to corporate and religious systems as well; many of them reject a bottom-line individualism with its obsession with rights, and instead identify with what might be called a kind of Tocquevillian localist promise: that as communities and families, as well as individuals, they'll someday be free to govern themselves, and build something themselves, and judge the morality of something for themselves, without getting dragged into (in their view) endless and corrupting fights over whether to allow this tax break or violate that social taboo. If you dig into the data behind the aforementioned studies, that ambivalence is evident. And even more appealing to me, given my own political preferences, is that these evolving libertarian ideas, by developing at least partly outside the paradigm of inviolable property rights and such, may ultimately produce the kind of thinking which can contribute to what I see as truly positive egalitarian or anarchic developments, whether they be some kind of "bleeding heart libertarianism" or good old-fashioned economic mutualism. That may be too much to hope for--but then again, the notion that the present generation is going to give rise to a more affirmative, aggressive, but also decentralized left has at least a little grounding in recent political developments:

[A] mountain of survey data--including the heavily Democratic tilt of Millennials in every national election in which they have voted--suggests that they are not especially susceptible to the right-wing populist appeals....[T]oday, a Republican seeking to divert Millennial frustrations in a conservative cultural direction must reckon with the fact that Millennials are dramatically more liberal than the elderly and substantially more liberal than the Reagan-Clinton generation on every major culture war issue except abortion....They are also more dovish on foreign policy. According to the Pew Research Center, Millennials are close to half as likely as the Reagan-Clinton generation to accept sacrificing civil liberties in the fight against terrorism  and much less likely to say the best way to fight terrorism is through military force....Millennials show a libertarian instinct in the privatization of Social Security, which they disproportionately favor....But Millennials are also more willing than their elders to challenge cherished American myths about capitalism and class. According to a 2011 Pew study, Americans under 30 are the only segment of the population to describe themselves as “have nots” rather than “haves.” They are far more likely than older Americans to say that business enjoys more control over their lives than government.  And unlike older Americans, who favor capitalism over socialism by roughly 25 points, Millennials, narrowly, favor socialism.

So, maybe what I'm managing to help create--whatever my role in that creation may actually be--is a bunch of libertarian-inclined potential anarcho-socialists, people who want to build a fairer, less violent, more equal, and more sustainable society, and want to see it done through local action, not the government dole. There are ways to argue with that position, and it may not fit my idiosyncratic Christian democratic dreams--but its worth taking seriously and even praising all the same, I think. And so, as my students go about building their free speech walls and mourning the death of the 10th amendment around campus, I'm kind of delighted. No, it's not the revolution I want, but it is, however minimally, a revolution which takes ideas serious--and seeing as how I think at least some of those ideas are absolutely correct, how could I not be happy to see it up and running?