October 2008 Archives

My latest Dallas Morning News column, this one about the mentality of entitlement that I, and most of my generation and beyond, grew up with -- and how that may all be about to come to an end. Here's how it starts:

The day I got my first paycheck in my first post-college job, I walked into my old campus saloon - the gang hardly recognized me in a suit - leaned on the bar and ordered a Heineken. Not a pitcher of whatever watery suds were on sale to the penurious undergraduates, whose wretched lot I shared only a few weeks earlier. Nope, I asked for an imported brand. And you know, for once I didn't have to worry about it.

That was 20 years ago. I don't know when I drank my last actual Heineken, but in a way, I've been a Heineken man ever since. That is, though I've never known wealth in my working life, I've also never had to do without, not in any serious way. There has always been money for Heineken. Live that way long enough, and you begin to think that the easy availability of Heineken is the natural order of things.

My father, he drinks whatever's on sale and doesn't care. That's his way. He was a child of the Great Depression. When I was a senior in high school, I tasted my first Heineken in, no kidding, Holland (cheap flights, a strong dollar - ah, 1984). When Daddy was a senior in high school, he installed the first indoor plumbing in his family's house.

Same planet, different worlds.

NYT poll finds that growing and serious doubts about Sarah Palin have taken their toll on the McCain campaign's popularity. Contrariwise, people who blame her for bringing down McCain are wrong, says David Donadio; the problem is him. Thoughts?

A heated farewell letter from an anonymous college professor leaving teaching, fed up with dumbass students and careerist hacks in the professoriat and university administration. Excerpt on the jump:

Here's a terrific, long, thoughtful new essay by Patrick Deneen in The New Atlantis, meditating on the connection between technology and culture, and how in our time technology has become anti-culture. The essay defies easy summation, but you get a sense of it below. Wendell Berry's critique is at the core of Deneen's own argument in this piece. Georgetown is so fortunate to have a young scholar like Deneen on its faculty. And we are all fortunate that he's such a pellucid writer, because he has a lot to teach us. Excerpt:

Lying deep at the heart of this division of use and care--the opposition to nature--are philosophies that reject the idea of the bounties and limits of nature, philosophies that regard nature chiefly as an obstacle to the fulfillment of our desires, that dismiss the lessons of culture to moderate our desires in light of the limits of local conditions, that elevate human comfort and wealth above other ends, and accordingly not only stress our opposition to nature, but to cultures that developed alongside local natural conditions. Francis Bacon called for a change in humanity's relationship with the natural world, to view nature as an enemy and to understand the human mind as a weapon. In describing the modern scientific project, he charged us to understand that "knowledge is power," and at points described nature as a kind of prisoner withholding precious secrets from us, justifying our extraction of those secrets even by torture, if necessary. Following Bacon, we have transformed technology from ways of using nature that nevertheless coexist with nature--that "care for what we use"--to ways of exerting human will and fulfilling human desire in spite of nature and therefore, ultimately, in spite of culture.

It has been during this short period of industrialization that most of our longstanding cultural forms have attenuated, faded, or gone wholly out of existence. Writing as a farmer, Berry has repeatedly lamented the decline of the family farm as a locus of human community and the embodiment of numberless forms of cultural knowledge and practices. But everywhere we see around us the ruins of once vibrant culture. Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot locate the constellations, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (that is, actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance.

My grandmother could do most of the things on this list. And by many measures, our time would regard her as uneducated or look upon her as "simple" in spite of the variety and the complexity of things she knew how to do. But if the lights went out tomorrow, she would have been the smartest person we know; she (and not our college professors) would have seen us through. She's gone now, and much of that knowledge has been laid to rest with her because, by the time of my generation, we didn't need to know those things anymore.

Some people might respond to this list with perhaps a modicum of regret, wishing at least that we could track--that would be cool--but also recognizing that we don't have to. After all, we have handheld GPS gadgets for getting around, industrial agriculture for food production, cheap clothing from China so that we don't have to make or repair garments, cheap labor from Mexico so that we don't have to build or fix, and the Internet for everything else. But this is precisely the point: within roughly two generations we have lost a vast storehouse of cultural memory that was the accumulation of countless generations who saw it as their duty to posterity, grounded in gratitude to ancestors, to ensure safe passage of this knowledge to future generations. Culture itself has come to be viewed as disposable based on the illusion of independence from nature that our modern technologies have bequeathed us. Why spend time diligently learning at the side of your father how to repair a bucket or navigate by the stars or grow vegetables when every young person knows that a machine will do this work--or that cheap replacement products are readily available?

A provocative essay in The American Conservative by Austin Bramwell says that the conservative "movement" is useless at best and a misleading distraction at worst. Excerpt:

In short, conservatism is not a philosophy or approach to political affairs that inspires the set of institutions known as the conservative movement. Rather, the conservative movement is a set of institutions that inspires the ideology known as conservatism. In the absence of a movement, the felt need to develop a coherent understanding of conservatism would evaporate.

Of course, the movement is not going anywhere and debates as to the meaning of conservatism will continue. Suppose, however, one agrees with this or that position closely associated with the movement. Does it follow that one should engage in movement-building activities? No. Non-movement conservatives have arguably done more to advance conservative ideas and without the burden of fitting them into an ideological system or wondering how they may affect their standing within an ideological movement.

A non-movement conservative by definition has no meaningful affiliation with movement conservative institutions. He may not even care whether others call him a "conservative." (Indeed, movement conservatives may be quick to denounce him.) But that needn't limit his influence. On the contrary, consider the impact of these notable non-movement conservatives going back to the era of the movement's founding.

Bramwell goes on to discuss Joseph Schumpeter, Tom Wolfe and others. And then:

Only the non-movement conservatives have managed to upset the intellectual consensus, for they speak to the intellectual establishment rather than at it. Consider the major traumas of establishment liberalism: Jane Jacobs's Death and Life [of American Cities], Daniel Moynihan's 1965 Report on the Negro Family, E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement speech, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. At the time, not one of these authors was known as a movement conservative.

The man is onto something.