A Minority View Walter Williams Colleges' intellectual thuggery
By Walter Williams, Ph.D. [a black professor]
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58176
Wednesday, October 17,
The average taxpayer and parents who foot the bill know little about the rot on many college campuses. "Indoctrinate U" is a recently released documentary, written and directed by Evan Coyne Maloney, that captures the tip of a disgusting iceberg. The trailer for "Indoctrinate U" can be seen online.
"Indoctrinate U" starts out with an interview of professor David Clemens, at Monterey Peninsula College, who reads an administrative directive regarding new course proposals: "Include a description of how course topics are treated to develop a knowledge and understanding of race, class, and gender issues." Clemens is fighting the directive, which applies not just to sociology classes but math, physics, ornamental horticulture and other classes whose subject material has nothing to do with race, class and gender issues.
Professor Noel Ignatiev, of the Massachusetts School of Art, explains that his concern is to do away with whiteness. Why? "Because whiteness is a form of racial oppression." Ignatiev adds, "There cannot be a white race without the phenomenon of white supremacy." What's blackness? According to Ignatiev, "Blackness is an identity that can be plausibly argued to arise out of a resistance to oppression." Bucknell professor Geoff Schneider agrees, saying, "A lot of our students, I think, are unconsciously racist." Both Ignatiev and Schneider are white.
(Column continues below)
The College of William & Mary and Tufts and Brown universities established racially segregated student orientations. At some universities, students are provided with racially segregated housing, and at others they are treated to racially separate graduation ceremonies.
Under the ruse of ending harassment, a number of universities have established speech codes. Bowdoin College has banned jokes and stories "experienced by others as harassing." Brown University has banned "verbal behavior" that "produces feelings of impotence, anger or disenfranchisement" whether "unintentional or intentional." University of Connecticut has outlawed "inappropriately directed laughter." Colby College has banned any speech that could lead to a loss of self-esteem. "Suggestive looks" are banned at Bryn Mawr College and "unwelcomed flirtations" at Haverford College. Fortunately for students, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, has waged a successful war against such speech codes.
Central Connecticut State College set up a panel to discuss slavery reparations. All seven speakers, invited by the school, supported the idea. Professor Jay Bergman questioned the lack of diversity on the panel. In response, two members of the African Studies department published a letter criticizing Bergman, saying, "The protests against reparations stand on the same platform that produced apartheid, Hitler and the KKK." Such a response, as professor Bergman says, is nothing less than intellectual thuggery.
For universities such as Columbia and Yale, military recruiters are unwelcome, but they welcome terrorists such as Columbia University's invitation to Col. Moammar Gadhafi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yale admitted former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a student, despite his fourth-grade education and high school equivalency degree.
On other campuses, such as Lehigh, Central Michigan, Arizona, Holy Cross and California Berkeley universities, administrators banned students, staff and faculty from showing signs of patriotism after the 9/11 attacks. On some campuses, display of the American flag was banned; the Pledge of Allegiance and singing patriotic songs were banned out of fear of possibly offending foreign students.
Several university officials refused to be interviewed for the documentary. They wanted to keep their campus policies under wraps, not only from reporters but parents as well. When college admissions officials make their recruitment visits, they don't tell parents that their children will learn "whiteness is a form of racial oppression," or that they sponsor racially segregated orientations, dorms and graduation ceremonies. Parents and prospective students are kept in the dark.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has published "Choosing the Right College," to which I've written the introduction. The guide provides a wealth of information to help parents and students choose the right college.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Mortimer Adler - A Transformational Marxist
Mortimer Adler is known by many as the author of "How to Read a Book" (1940) which he coauthored with Charles Van Doren. It is considered the classic guide to intelligent reading. I have read the book recently and was recommending it as helpful preparation for home based college studies. My reasons, and the reasons other Biblical minded people recommend this book is based on its practical ideas for getting the most information and learning out of a book. "How to Read a Book" also includes a list of the classic works considered the foundation of western civilizations, which is helpful to the Christian toward understanding our times.
Last Friday, Dean Gotcher (AuthorityResearch.com) and his wife Karen were having supper at our home when I mention this as a book that I found helpful. Dean then pointed out that Mortimer Alder is a Transformational Marxist, which I later learned is a "slow march through the institutions" as a strategy for changing the world, popularized by Marxist Antonio Gramsi.
Dean also pointed out that Mortimer Adler founded the Aspen Institute
According to the Apen Institute website: Paepcke created what is now the Aspen Institute. He was a trustee of the University of Chicago, and his participation in its Great Books seminar, led by philosopher Mortimer Adler, inspired the Institute's Executive Seminar. The seminar is a forum based on the writings of great thinkers of the past and present. Through reading and discussing selections from the works of classic and modern writers, leaders better understand the human challenges facing the organizations and communities they serve. "The Executive Seminar was not intended to make a corporate treasurer a more skilled corporate treasurer," said Paepcke, "but to help a leader gain access to his or her own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and more self-fulfilling."
Understanding the history of western civilization does give people the tools to help transform society, toward their preferred worldview. Mortimer Adler apparently viewed having a Great Books understanding of western civilization as important for slowly implementing Marxism. Many Christians today see some of that same historical body of knowledge as valuable for Biblically discerning the times clearly enough to implement Biblical truths where errors have dominated.
I therefore see a need for someone, perhaps a home school or home college student interested in writing and worldview issues, to analyze "How to Read a Book" to discover and list any of its Marxist features and redeem the value of the book by taking its thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ.
Here is the entire book free online: How to Read a Book
Last Friday, Dean Gotcher (AuthorityResearch.com) and his wife Karen were having supper at our home when I mention this as a book that I found helpful. Dean then pointed out that Mortimer Alder is a Transformational Marxist, which I later learned is a "slow march through the institutions" as a strategy for changing the world, popularized by Marxist Antonio Gramsi.
Dean also pointed out that Mortimer Adler founded the Aspen Institute
According to the Apen Institute website: Paepcke created what is now the Aspen Institute. He was a trustee of the University of Chicago, and his participation in its Great Books seminar, led by philosopher Mortimer Adler, inspired the Institute's Executive Seminar. The seminar is a forum based on the writings of great thinkers of the past and present. Through reading and discussing selections from the works of classic and modern writers, leaders better understand the human challenges facing the organizations and communities they serve. "The Executive Seminar was not intended to make a corporate treasurer a more skilled corporate treasurer," said Paepcke, "but to help a leader gain access to his or her own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and more self-fulfilling."
Understanding the history of western civilization does give people the tools to help transform society, toward their preferred worldview. Mortimer Adler apparently viewed having a Great Books understanding of western civilization as important for slowly implementing Marxism. Many Christians today see some of that same historical body of knowledge as valuable for Biblically discerning the times clearly enough to implement Biblical truths where errors have dominated.
I therefore see a need for someone, perhaps a home school or home college student interested in writing and worldview issues, to analyze "How to Read a Book" to discover and list any of its Marxist features and redeem the value of the book by taking its thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ.
Here is the entire book free online: How to Read a Book
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Regarding the Tension between Home Schoolers and Public Schoolers
Home schooled parents and children sometimes feel a tension or unspoken resentment when in the presence of public schooled parents or children. If words were put to the thoughts occurring, the public schooled parents and children think: “You poor home schoolers just don’t know what you are missing with all the academic and social opportunities that are free at the local school! Your children are going to be social misfits and not be able to get good jobs. Who are you to think you can provide a real education when you haven’t even been to teacher’s college? You say you want freedom to teach your children, so you must be hiding something evil, because I’ve heard about child abuse and besides there is no other reason you could have for wanting such freedom.”
If you are familiar with 2 Corinthians
For we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves. But they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise. 2 Corinthians 10:12
We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies. 1 Corinthians 8:1
By pride comes nothing but strife, But with the well-advised is wisdom. Proverbs 13:10
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver. Proverbs 25:11
If anyone speaks, let him speak as the oracles of God. 1 Peter 4:11a
With pride revealed as a cause of the tension between public schoolers and home schoolers, then the first step toward resolving this tension becomes personal repentance and humility before God. The truth is that one’s educational choice does not make one person better than another. In fact, the truth is that we are equal in God’s eyes and have nothing to boast about except our infirmities and Christ (2 Corinthians 12:9).
The philosophies operating in the government school system are satanic at the root and destroying our country, which is an expected curse on a nation which has forsaken God. This has happened repeatedly in history as illustrated in 1 Kings and 2 Kings. It is the responsibility of Christians to understand our times, speak this truth in love, expect persecution if living godly, make disciples to Christ, and pray for Christians to awake to righteousness, which will necessitate home or Christian schools and an exodus from the public schools.
Home schoolers don’t need to compromise their convictions, they simply need to let Christ live through them, mind their own business and watch God answer their prayers. There will always be a tension and unspoken resentment between God and Satan as well as those following them and their agendas. As Dean Gotcher (AuthorityResearch.com) pointed out, the natural desire for peace between people with conflicting positions is understood by social engineers and is being deliberately used as a technique to lead Christians to compromise.
There will be true peace only when all people are in Christ. In the meantime, we have a secret to personal peace in the midst of the cultural conflict. That secret is to simply reckon our selves dead to the sin of comparison or other evil thoughts. The tension between home schoolers and public schoolers in the churches or the legislatures won’t bother any such “dead” homeschoolers as they teach and live the truth in love and allow their light to shine.
Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 6:11
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Matthew 5:16
Sunday, September 23, 2007
The Brotherhood of Darkness
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2866704516923817439&q=The+Brotherhood+of+Darkness Google Video
Monday, September 10, 2007
The Ron Paul epiphany
Posted: September 10, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Vox Day
© 2007
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57545
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Judging by the sounds of the laughter of the other Republican candidates directed at their rival, Ron Paul has now reached the second of Mohandas K. Ghandi's four stages. It is still unlikely that he will win the nomination of a party which has proven it doesn't deserve him, but it is far less unlikely than it was back when Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain were still considered "electable" by most political observers. The candidates, never a particularly bright lot, may be laughing, but as the neocons and party leaders turn to Fred Thompson in desperation, more intelligent observers are not.
Why is there so much cheering for Ron Paul?
– Andy McCarthy, National Review, Sept. 5, 2007
The reason there is so much cheering for Ron Paul is that he is the only Republican who has staked out popular positions on the two most significant issues of the 2008 election cycle. He is anti-occupation and pro-border control. No amount of Bush administration spin is going to change the fact that "the surge" is strategically irrelevant, that the neocon's Democratic World Revolution is a total failure and that Mexico is being allowed to invade the United States. In short, Ron Paul is the only Republican whose positions on the two primary issues are different than Hillary Clinton's stance on them, and, more importantly, are more credible and more popular than Hillary Clinton's. He is the only Republican whose nomination can realistically be considered a potential impediment to what otherwise looks like a Democratic landslide.
The Gay Old Party's leadership, which is far more interested in propositioning interns and policemen than the Constitution, hates Ron Paul and quite rightly feels threatened by him. But their incessant spreading of fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding his candidacy is no more believable than a Microsoft treatise on Linux. In fact, I surmise that most of the top Republicans would prefer a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton presidency to a Paul one. This may be why they have drafted the sluggish, uncharismatic Thompson; Giuliani, Romney and McCain are so obviously unelectable that none of them can even manage to put themselves in a position to get run over by Hillary in November.
When a thousand Republicans are in a room and one man of the eight on the stage takes a sharply minority viewpoint on a dramatic issue and half the room seems to cheer him, something's going on.
– Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 7, 2007
What's going on is the same as in 1976 and 1980, the Republican peasantry is rebelling against the choices that their lords and masters have laid before them. This is not merely a threat to the Republican leadership, but to the very concept of the bifactional ruling party that rules America in a "bipartisan" spirit. Ron Paul threatens the notion of politics as a team sport; his focus on actual constitutional principles makes him equally appealing to anti-occupation, pro-border Democrats as to anti-occupation, pro-border Republicans. That's why he is the only candidate in either party whose support ranges from devout Christian conservatives to gay, peacenik Ralph Nader fans.
Between now and November 2008, many Americans will experience the Ron Paul epiphany, in which the scales will fall from their eyes, and they will suddenly realize that they do not want the nation to continue in the direction that George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson, Hussein Osama and Rudy McRomney all intend on taking it. At this point, a 1976 scenario looks far more likely than a 1980 one, but then, few pundits thought Ron Paul would still require consideration at this point in the campaign.
The choice is simple. If you want to live under an EU-style regime that is intent on invading and occupying other countries in the name of democracy for the forseeable future, vote for any of the so-called major candidates. It doesn't matter which one. There is no significant difference between President Bush and Sen. Clinton, or between Sen. Thompson and Sen. Obama. If, on the other hand, you wish to live in a nation where the United States government is governed by the Constitution, you had better support Ron Paul. This may be your only opportunity, for it is entirely possible that this will be the last time such a choice is presented to you.
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Vox Day
© 2007
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57545
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Judging by the sounds of the laughter of the other Republican candidates directed at their rival, Ron Paul has now reached the second of Mohandas K. Ghandi's four stages. It is still unlikely that he will win the nomination of a party which has proven it doesn't deserve him, but it is far less unlikely than it was back when Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain were still considered "electable" by most political observers. The candidates, never a particularly bright lot, may be laughing, but as the neocons and party leaders turn to Fred Thompson in desperation, more intelligent observers are not.
Why is there so much cheering for Ron Paul?
– Andy McCarthy, National Review, Sept. 5, 2007
The reason there is so much cheering for Ron Paul is that he is the only Republican who has staked out popular positions on the two most significant issues of the 2008 election cycle. He is anti-occupation and pro-border control. No amount of Bush administration spin is going to change the fact that "the surge" is strategically irrelevant, that the neocon's Democratic World Revolution is a total failure and that Mexico is being allowed to invade the United States. In short, Ron Paul is the only Republican whose positions on the two primary issues are different than Hillary Clinton's stance on them, and, more importantly, are more credible and more popular than Hillary Clinton's. He is the only Republican whose nomination can realistically be considered a potential impediment to what otherwise looks like a Democratic landslide.
The Gay Old Party's leadership, which is far more interested in propositioning interns and policemen than the Constitution, hates Ron Paul and quite rightly feels threatened by him. But their incessant spreading of fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding his candidacy is no more believable than a Microsoft treatise on Linux. In fact, I surmise that most of the top Republicans would prefer a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton presidency to a Paul one. This may be why they have drafted the sluggish, uncharismatic Thompson; Giuliani, Romney and McCain are so obviously unelectable that none of them can even manage to put themselves in a position to get run over by Hillary in November.
When a thousand Republicans are in a room and one man of the eight on the stage takes a sharply minority viewpoint on a dramatic issue and half the room seems to cheer him, something's going on.
– Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 7, 2007
What's going on is the same as in 1976 and 1980, the Republican peasantry is rebelling against the choices that their lords and masters have laid before them. This is not merely a threat to the Republican leadership, but to the very concept of the bifactional ruling party that rules America in a "bipartisan" spirit. Ron Paul threatens the notion of politics as a team sport; his focus on actual constitutional principles makes him equally appealing to anti-occupation, pro-border Democrats as to anti-occupation, pro-border Republicans. That's why he is the only candidate in either party whose support ranges from devout Christian conservatives to gay, peacenik Ralph Nader fans.
Between now and November 2008, many Americans will experience the Ron Paul epiphany, in which the scales will fall from their eyes, and they will suddenly realize that they do not want the nation to continue in the direction that George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson, Hussein Osama and Rudy McRomney all intend on taking it. At this point, a 1976 scenario looks far more likely than a 1980 one, but then, few pundits thought Ron Paul would still require consideration at this point in the campaign.
The choice is simple. If you want to live under an EU-style regime that is intent on invading and occupying other countries in the name of democracy for the forseeable future, vote for any of the so-called major candidates. It doesn't matter which one. There is no significant difference between President Bush and Sen. Clinton, or between Sen. Thompson and Sen. Obama. If, on the other hand, you wish to live in a nation where the United States government is governed by the Constitution, you had better support Ron Paul. This may be your only opportunity, for it is entirely possible that this will be the last time such a choice is presented to you.
Sustainable Stealing
How specifically the United Nations is slowly stealing your private property on purpose through "sustainable development." - Free Video Click HERE
"For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light." Luke 16:8
Appropriate for every home college curriculum!
Monday, August 20, 2007
Old MacDonald Had A Farmers’ Market
Old MacDonald Had A Farmers’ Market –
total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal http://www.incharacter.org/printable.php?article=87#
By Bill McKibben
Generations of college freshmen, asked to read Walden, have sputtered with indignation when they learned that Henry David went back to Concord for dinner with his family every week or two. He’s cheating; his grand experiment is a fraud. This outrage is a useful tactic; it prevents them from having to grapple with the most important (and perhaps the most difficult) book in the American canon, one that asks impossibly searching questions about the emptiness of a consumer economy, the vacuity of an information-soaked era. But it also points to something else: Thoreau, our apostle of solitary, individual self-reliance, out in his cabin with his hoe and his beans, the most determinedly asocial man of his time — nonetheless was immersed in his community to a degree few people today can comprehend.
Consider the sheer number of people who happened to drop by the cabin of an obscure eccentric. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” he writes. Often more visitors came than could sit — sometimes twenty or thirty at a time. “Half-witted men from the almshouse,” busybodies who “pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out,” a French-Canadian woodchopper, a runaway slave “whom I helped to forward toward the north star,” doctors, lawyers, the old and infirm and the timid, the self-styled reformers. It’s not that Thoreau was necessarily a cheerful host — there were visitors “who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness.” Instead, it was simply a visiting age — as most of human history has been a visiting age, and every human culture a visiting culture.
Until ours. I doubt if many people reading these words have had a spontaneous visit from a neighbor in the past week — less than a fifth of Americans report visiting regularly with friends and neighbors, and the percentage is declining steadily. The number of close friends that an American claims has dropped steadily for the last fifty years too; three-quarters of us don’t know our next-door neighbors. Even the people who share our houses are becoming strangers: The Wall Street Journal reported recently that “major builders and top architects are walling off space. They’re touting one-person ‘internet alcoves,’ locked-door ‘away rooms,’ and his-and-her offices on opposite ends of the house.” The new floor plans, says the director of research for the National Association of Home Builders, are “good for the dysfunctional family.” Or, as another executive put it, these are the perfect homes for “families that don’t want anything to do with one another.” Compared to these guys, Thoreau with his three-chair cabin was practically Martha Stewart.
Every culture has its pathologies, and ours is self-reliance. From some mix of our frontier past, our Little House on the Prairie heritage, our Thoreauvian desire for solitude, and our amazing wealth we’ve derived a level of independence never seen before on this round earth. We’ve built an economy where we need no one else; with a credit card, you can harvest the world’s bounty from the privacy of your room. And we’ve built a culture much the same — the dream houses those architects build, needless to say, come with a plasma screen in every room. As long as we can go on earning good money in our own tiny niche, we don’t need a helping hand from a soul — save, of course, from the invisible hand that cups us all in its benign grip.
There are a couple of problems with this fine scenario, of course. One is: we’re miserable. Reported levels of happiness and life-satisfaction are locked in long-term one-way declines, almost certainly because of this lack of connection. Does this sound subjective and airy? Find one of the tens of millions of Americans who don’t belong to anything and convince them to join a church, a softball league, a bird-watching group. In the next year their mortality — the risk that they will die in the next year — falls by half.
The other trouble is that our self-reliance is actually a reliance on cheap fossil fuel and the economy it’s built. Take that away — either because we start to run out of oil, or because global warming forces us to stop using it in current quantities — and our vaunted independence will start to lurch like a Hummer with four flat tires. Just think for a moment about that world and then decide if you want to live on an acre all your own in the outermost ring of suburbs.
The idea of self-reliance is so deep in our psyches, however, that even when we attempt to escape from the unhappy and unsustainable cul-de-sac of our society, we’re likely to turn toward yet more “independence.” The “back-to-the-land” movement, for instance, often added the words “by myself.” Think about how proudly a certain kind of person talks about his “off-the-grid” life — he makes his own energy and grows his own food, he can deal with whatever the world throws at him. One such person may be left-wing in politics (à la Scott and Helen Nearing); another may be conservative. But they are united in their lack of need for the larger world. Not even to school their kids — they’ll take care of that as well.
Such folks are admirable, of course — they have a wide variety of skills now missing in most Americans; they’re able to amuse themselves; they work hard. But as an ideal, especially an economic ideal, that radical self-reliance strikes me as being almost as empty as the consumer society from which it dissents. Consider, for instance, the idea of growing all your own food. It’s clearly better than relying on food from thousands of miles away — from our current industrialized food economy, which figures “it’s always summer somewhere” and so orders take-out from that distant field every night of the year. Compared with that, an enormous garden and a root cellar full of all you’ll need for the winter is virtue incarnate. But if you believe in many of the (entirely plausible) horror stories about what’s to come — peak oil, climate change — then the world ends with you standing shotgun in hand above your vegetable patch, protecting your carrots from the poaching urban horde.
Contrast that with another vision, one taking shape in at least a few places around the country: a matrix of small farmers growing food for their local areas. Farmers’ markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy, with sales showing double-digit growth annually. Partly that’s because people want good food (all kinds of people: immigrants and ethnic Americans tend to be the most avid farmers’ market shoppers). And partly it’s because they want more company. One team of sociologists reported recently that shoppers at farmers’ markets engaged in ten times more conversations per visit than customers in supermarkets. I spent the past winter eating only from my valley; a little of the food I grew myself, but the idea of my experiment was to see what remained of the agricultural infrastructure that had once supported this place. And the payoff was not only a delicious six months, but also a deep network of new friends, a much stronger sense of the cultural geography of my place.
Or consider energy. Since the 1970s, a particular breed of noble ex-hippie has been building “off-the-grid” homes, often relying on solar panels. This has been important work — they’ve figured out many of the techniques and technologies that we desperately need to get free of our climate change predicament. But the most exciting new gadget is a home-scale inverter, one that allows you to send the power your rooftop generates down the line instead of down into the basement. Where the isolated system has a stack of batteries, the grid-tied solar panel uses the whole region’s electric system as its battery: my electric meter spins merrily backward all afternoon because while the sun shines I’m a utility; then at night I draw from somewhere else. It’s a two-way flow, in the same way that the internet allows ideas to bounce in many directions.
You can do the same kind of calculation with almost any commodity. Music doesn’t need to come from Nashville or Hollywood on a small disc, for instance. But you don’t have to produce it all yourself either. More fun to join with the neighbors, to make music together or to listen to the local stars. A hundred years ago, Iowa had 1,300 opera houses. Radio doesn’t need to come from the ClearChannel headquarters in some Texas office park; new low-power FM lets valleys make their own. Even currency can become a joint local project — all it takes is the trust that underwrites any system of money. In hundreds of communities, people are trying to build that trust locally, with money that only works within the region.
Thinking this way won’t be easy. We’re used to independence as the prime virtue — so used to it that three quarters of American Christians believe the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” comes from the Bible, instead of Ben Franklin. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is harder advice, but sweeter and more sage. We don’t need to live on communes (though more and more old people are finding themselves enrolling in “retirement communities” that are gray-haired, upscale versions). But we will, I think, need to figure out how to stop relying on both oil and ourselves, and instead learn the lesson that the other primates and the other human cultures never forgot: we’re built to rely on each other.
.....
Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and the author of many books, including Enough, Wandering Home, The End of Nature, Hundred Dollar Holiday, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.
total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal http://www.incharacter.org/printable.php?article=87#
By Bill McKibben
Generations of college freshmen, asked to read Walden, have sputtered with indignation when they learned that Henry David went back to Concord for dinner with his family every week or two. He’s cheating; his grand experiment is a fraud. This outrage is a useful tactic; it prevents them from having to grapple with the most important (and perhaps the most difficult) book in the American canon, one that asks impossibly searching questions about the emptiness of a consumer economy, the vacuity of an information-soaked era. But it also points to something else: Thoreau, our apostle of solitary, individual self-reliance, out in his cabin with his hoe and his beans, the most determinedly asocial man of his time — nonetheless was immersed in his community to a degree few people today can comprehend.
Consider the sheer number of people who happened to drop by the cabin of an obscure eccentric. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” he writes. Often more visitors came than could sit — sometimes twenty or thirty at a time. “Half-witted men from the almshouse,” busybodies who “pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out,” a French-Canadian woodchopper, a runaway slave “whom I helped to forward toward the north star,” doctors, lawyers, the old and infirm and the timid, the self-styled reformers. It’s not that Thoreau was necessarily a cheerful host — there were visitors “who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness.” Instead, it was simply a visiting age — as most of human history has been a visiting age, and every human culture a visiting culture.
Until ours. I doubt if many people reading these words have had a spontaneous visit from a neighbor in the past week — less than a fifth of Americans report visiting regularly with friends and neighbors, and the percentage is declining steadily. The number of close friends that an American claims has dropped steadily for the last fifty years too; three-quarters of us don’t know our next-door neighbors. Even the people who share our houses are becoming strangers: The Wall Street Journal reported recently that “major builders and top architects are walling off space. They’re touting one-person ‘internet alcoves,’ locked-door ‘away rooms,’ and his-and-her offices on opposite ends of the house.” The new floor plans, says the director of research for the National Association of Home Builders, are “good for the dysfunctional family.” Or, as another executive put it, these are the perfect homes for “families that don’t want anything to do with one another.” Compared to these guys, Thoreau with his three-chair cabin was practically Martha Stewart.
Every culture has its pathologies, and ours is self-reliance. From some mix of our frontier past, our Little House on the Prairie heritage, our Thoreauvian desire for solitude, and our amazing wealth we’ve derived a level of independence never seen before on this round earth. We’ve built an economy where we need no one else; with a credit card, you can harvest the world’s bounty from the privacy of your room. And we’ve built a culture much the same — the dream houses those architects build, needless to say, come with a plasma screen in every room. As long as we can go on earning good money in our own tiny niche, we don’t need a helping hand from a soul — save, of course, from the invisible hand that cups us all in its benign grip.
There are a couple of problems with this fine scenario, of course. One is: we’re miserable. Reported levels of happiness and life-satisfaction are locked in long-term one-way declines, almost certainly because of this lack of connection. Does this sound subjective and airy? Find one of the tens of millions of Americans who don’t belong to anything and convince them to join a church, a softball league, a bird-watching group. In the next year their mortality — the risk that they will die in the next year — falls by half.
The other trouble is that our self-reliance is actually a reliance on cheap fossil fuel and the economy it’s built. Take that away — either because we start to run out of oil, or because global warming forces us to stop using it in current quantities — and our vaunted independence will start to lurch like a Hummer with four flat tires. Just think for a moment about that world and then decide if you want to live on an acre all your own in the outermost ring of suburbs.
The idea of self-reliance is so deep in our psyches, however, that even when we attempt to escape from the unhappy and unsustainable cul-de-sac of our society, we’re likely to turn toward yet more “independence.” The “back-to-the-land” movement, for instance, often added the words “by myself.” Think about how proudly a certain kind of person talks about his “off-the-grid” life — he makes his own energy and grows his own food, he can deal with whatever the world throws at him. One such person may be left-wing in politics (à la Scott and Helen Nearing); another may be conservative. But they are united in their lack of need for the larger world. Not even to school their kids — they’ll take care of that as well.
Such folks are admirable, of course — they have a wide variety of skills now missing in most Americans; they’re able to amuse themselves; they work hard. But as an ideal, especially an economic ideal, that radical self-reliance strikes me as being almost as empty as the consumer society from which it dissents. Consider, for instance, the idea of growing all your own food. It’s clearly better than relying on food from thousands of miles away — from our current industrialized food economy, which figures “it’s always summer somewhere” and so orders take-out from that distant field every night of the year. Compared with that, an enormous garden and a root cellar full of all you’ll need for the winter is virtue incarnate. But if you believe in many of the (entirely plausible) horror stories about what’s to come — peak oil, climate change — then the world ends with you standing shotgun in hand above your vegetable patch, protecting your carrots from the poaching urban horde.
Contrast that with another vision, one taking shape in at least a few places around the country: a matrix of small farmers growing food for their local areas. Farmers’ markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy, with sales showing double-digit growth annually. Partly that’s because people want good food (all kinds of people: immigrants and ethnic Americans tend to be the most avid farmers’ market shoppers). And partly it’s because they want more company. One team of sociologists reported recently that shoppers at farmers’ markets engaged in ten times more conversations per visit than customers in supermarkets. I spent the past winter eating only from my valley; a little of the food I grew myself, but the idea of my experiment was to see what remained of the agricultural infrastructure that had once supported this place. And the payoff was not only a delicious six months, but also a deep network of new friends, a much stronger sense of the cultural geography of my place.
Or consider energy. Since the 1970s, a particular breed of noble ex-hippie has been building “off-the-grid” homes, often relying on solar panels. This has been important work — they’ve figured out many of the techniques and technologies that we desperately need to get free of our climate change predicament. But the most exciting new gadget is a home-scale inverter, one that allows you to send the power your rooftop generates down the line instead of down into the basement. Where the isolated system has a stack of batteries, the grid-tied solar panel uses the whole region’s electric system as its battery: my electric meter spins merrily backward all afternoon because while the sun shines I’m a utility; then at night I draw from somewhere else. It’s a two-way flow, in the same way that the internet allows ideas to bounce in many directions.
You can do the same kind of calculation with almost any commodity. Music doesn’t need to come from Nashville or Hollywood on a small disc, for instance. But you don’t have to produce it all yourself either. More fun to join with the neighbors, to make music together or to listen to the local stars. A hundred years ago, Iowa had 1,300 opera houses. Radio doesn’t need to come from the ClearChannel headquarters in some Texas office park; new low-power FM lets valleys make their own. Even currency can become a joint local project — all it takes is the trust that underwrites any system of money. In hundreds of communities, people are trying to build that trust locally, with money that only works within the region.
Thinking this way won’t be easy. We’re used to independence as the prime virtue — so used to it that three quarters of American Christians believe the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” comes from the Bible, instead of Ben Franklin. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is harder advice, but sweeter and more sage. We don’t need to live on communes (though more and more old people are finding themselves enrolling in “retirement communities” that are gray-haired, upscale versions). But we will, I think, need to figure out how to stop relying on both oil and ourselves, and instead learn the lesson that the other primates and the other human cultures never forgot: we’re built to rely on each other.
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Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and the author of many books, including Enough, Wandering Home, The End of Nature, Hundred Dollar Holiday, and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.
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