Paideia

The Meaning of Every Movement

"Where gestures lack style, ethics itself becomes debased."

Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

The recluse is humanity’s delegate to what is important.

-Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 226

"You'll Never Be Alone" by Christopher Clausen, City Journal Spring 2010

As anyone knows who spends time in the sunshine latitudes of contemporary America, gated “55-plus communities” have been spreading faster than kudzu ever since the oldest cohort of baby boomers felt the first twinges of arthritis. The oddly age-specific phrase signifies that the developments in question are designed for the needs of the (relatively affluent) retired. Typically, at least one resident of each unit must be at least 55 years old, and no permanent resident can be a minor. Why 55 became the canonical age rather than 50 or 60 is hard to say, but the figure is now so deeply ingrained that the vast Del Webb chain uses the variation “55 or better” in all its advertising.

Now that I’m a whole decade better than 55, my wife and I recently drove more than 2,000 miles touring such properties in the Southeast. Our original goal was simply to visit friends from Indiana who had decided to spend the rest of their days in The Villages, a retirement empire that stretches halfway across the flatlands of north central Florida. That particular realm of gold, feelingly described by Andrew Blechman in Leisureville, seemed too unreal to appeal to us—an endless sprawl of “town centers,” complete with ethnic themes and fake histories, around which you can observe hundreds of senior citizens tooling along on golf carts, day and night.

Florida sunshine, however, promised such a sublime change from the gray Northeast that it inspired an inspection tour of other, less grandiose, communities. Over the course of a few months, we visited half a dozen such places on the outskirts of Florida cities, beside Georgia lakes, or in verdant mountains. One hugged the bank of a South Carolina river and had just built an enormous shed for its residents’ boats. All had lavish recreational facilities and activities directors who offered daily classes in how to use them. As these places repeatedly emphasize, they are for “active adults” and carefully avoid any resemblance to nursing homes. The whole experience boiled down to one basic appeal, summarized by the horrifying promise we encountered again and again: “You’ll never be alone.” Or, as one resident enthused, “It’s like being back in high school!”

A succession of charismatic women in their twenties named Cyndi, Brandy, Misty, and Tara—I am not making the names up—led us through the neighborhoods, stopping every few minutes to talk animatedly with some resident who had succumbed to the same treatment six months or a year ago. Each a native of her territory, they were all the sort of fiddle-dee-dee sex bombs who transition effortlessly from high school cheerleading to selling middle managers from Milwaukee on top-of-the-line retirement homes while still keeping the wives charmed. Following them around was such a mindless pleasure that it was surprising to discover now and then that their grasp of figures was everything a sales manager could wish.

My wife, with the inbred politeness of a native Virginian, drove herself crazy trying to keep up with Brandy or Misty’s relentless extroversion and invariably conveyed the misleading impression that she loved everything she saw, whether it was a three-room condo or a replica of Mount Vernon in modern materials. Meanwhile, the job of asking about construction, bylaws, monthly fees, and whether two people who never played golf would still be paying for the upkeep on a championship course fell to me. Only once did I come up with a question that had apparently never been asked. Most of the residences, no matter how small, had rooms with glass doors referred to as libraries. When I asked Cyndi or Tara whether built-in bookshelves were available as an option, she seemed utterly baffled. “Why,” she wondered aloud, “would you want bookshelves in the library?”

With or without shelves, the outcome was always the same. Once we were back in the privacy of our accommodations, my wife fumed that she would rather die of rabies than live in something made out of Hardy Board, and it would be my duty to tell Misty or Cyndi that if it were up to me, we’d move here tomorrow, but unfortunately these houses reminded my wife of orange crates, or slightly more tactful words to that effect.

So in the end, little came of our 55-or-better tour, apart from the memory of following Quebec license plates up and down Interstate 95. Part of the reason was that these communities are designed for exceptionally outgoing people who love group activities, set a low value on privacy, and don’t mind living in a mass-produced structure that is rarely built to outlast its owners by much. Another source of our paralysis is still more difficult to overcome because it seems to involve an abiding law of human nature, which is that as many men grow older, they become less tolerant of cold weather, while many women become less tolerant of heat. No retirement community I know of, from Maine to Miami, has found a way to deal with that dirty trick evolution can play on even the most gregarious couples.

Christopher Clausen is the author of Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America.

via www.city-journal.org

"Radical Homemakers"

Thank you Daniel for finding this, wonderful insight into the shape of our domestic lives today, and the shape we want them to take!

Radical Homemakers

BY PATRICK J. DENEEN

Over the weekend, while browsing the shelves of a bookstore, I picked up a book with a promising title:Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. Its author, Shannon Hayes, argues with passion and with telling and appealing examples that families should step out of our badly-oriented, self-destructive consumerist culture, and seek to achieve a high degree of self-sufficiency within the contexts of community by eschewing the consumptive ethic and the corresponding felt need of both spouses – or, indeed, either – to “succeed” in the corporate rat-race. She recommends a shared life of living and working mainly within one’s own household: growing and making one’s own food, repairing one’s modest possessions, living frugally, and creating one’s own entertainment. While framing her argument as one drawing from “progressive” impulses aimed at “social justice,” it might easily be categorized as a companion volume to Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, essentially a traditionalist rejection of a modern utilitarian, consumptive ethos.

In an article explaining the book’s thesis, the following is excerpted:

The Origins of Homemaking: A vocation for both sexes

Housewives and husbands were free people, who owned their own homes and lived off their land.
Upon further investigation, I learned that the household did not become the “woman’s sphere” until the Industrial Revolution. A search for the origin of the word housewife traces it back to the thirteenth century, as the feudal period was coming to an end in Europe and the first signs of a middle class were popping up. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan explains that housewives were wedded to husbands, whose name came from hus, an old spelling of house, and bonded. Husbands were bonded to houses, rather than to lords. Housewives and husbands were free people, who owned their own homes and lived off their land. While there was a division of labor among the sexes in these early households, there was also an equal distribution of domestic work. Once the Industrial Revolution happened, however, things changed. Men left the household to work for wages, which were then used to purchase goods and services that they were no longer home to provide. Indeed, the men were the first to lose their domestic skills as successive generations forgot how to butcher the family hog, how to sew leather, how to chop firewood.

As the Industrial Revolution forged on and crossed the ocean to America, men and women eventually stopped working together to provide for their household sustenance. They developed their separate spheres—man in the factory, woman in the home. The more a man worked outside the home, the more the household would have to buy in order to have needs met. Soon the factories were able to fabricate products to supplant the housewives’ duties as well. The housewife’s primary function ultimately became chauffeur and consumer. The household was no longer a unit of production. It was a unit of consumption.

That is, what we today call “freedom” or autonomy is a kind of enslavement to outside powers, the replacement of old lords (aristocrats) with new corporate lords (“meritocrats”). Our cognitive dissonance comes from the fact that we confuse being “bonded” to the home as a kind of bondage, when in fact it is the true source of our freedom. Only by being productive and relatively self-sufficient within our households and communities are we truly liberated from those outside powers that see us only as fungible asset collections to be bled. The current rage of the Tea Partiers, and even that by some increasingly on the Left who begin to understand that Obama is a pawn and enabler of those corporate powers (e.g., Frank Rich), have not been able to adequately explicate the precise form of our bondage, because the language of freedom and autonomy to which they would appeal has been so degraded for the past half-millennium. The Tea Partiers, in particular, direct much of their rage against the government, which – while a proper object in many particular respects – misses the more fundamental target, which is the perverse and destructive wedding of big government and big business in their shared effort to make us new serfs. Their rightful rage needs a better articulated object.

The only major shortcoming of the book that I have so far detected is a confusion of categories – throughout the book, Hayes claims that her argument in defense of the home is essentially “progressive.” What she calls “progressive” is, in fact, profoundly conservative, reaching back to the arguments at the heart of Catholic distributist theory at least since the 19th-century. Unfortunately, it appears that she has read neither Chesterton nor Belloc, nor has had any exposure to Christopher Lasch, all of whom are absent in her bibliography, and could have offered her a healthy corrective to this confusion. I think it’s more than a verbal mistake to call her argument “progressive,” for at the heart of her excellent case against modern organization is a rejection of nearly every aspect of what is today called “progress.” Hayes rejects growth, autonomy, expansion of human dominion, and wealth as what are purported to be the central goals of modern humanity (though, to be fair, hers is also a strong argument against much of what today passes for “conservatism,” in its “progressive” embrace of a corporate society aimed at “equal opportunity,” social mobility, and wealth expansion based on maximal extraction from and degradation of the natural world). Instead, Hayes would put the family, the household, and the community at the heart of our activities, and asks not how those forms of human association can serve the economy, but how the economy best can serve our shared lives. But for some philosophical confusion, it’s an excellent book, and one that points to a promising coalition of new feminism and traditionalism.

The Connection Between Food and Fairies | Front Porch Republic

“[Family life must have been different] in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet…are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, from an unpublished letter to Arthur Greeves, June 22, 1930

via www.frontporchrepublic.com

The Sun Magazine | Digging In (with Wendell Berry

 

For more than forty years, Wendell Berry has worked his family farm in Kentucky the old-fashioned way, using horses as much as possible and producing much of his own food. And he has published more than forty books, writing by hand in the daylight to reduce his reliance on electricity derived from strip-mined coal. Berry has been called a “prophet” by the New York Times, and his Jeffersonian values are so old they can appear startlingly new. His strong pro-environment position has made him something of a cult hero on the Left, as have his antiwar sentiments, which have grown sharper over the years. His 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” published in Harper’s, led some to accuse him of being antitechnology, a Luddite. For his part, Berry has criticized environmentalists for not working to protect farms as well as wilderness. His stout self-reliance and unabashed use of moral and religious language in his writing have endeared him to a number of conservatives, even as his stance against corporate globalization has drawn criticism from others. But these apparent contradictions don’t seem to bother Berry one whit...

Fearnside: Stopping by a local eatery on the way here, I asked people what they might want to ask you. Henry County is small, they noted, and farming isn’t very profitable anymore. So, why did you stay when you could have left for, as one waitress put it, “glitz and glamour” elsewhere?

Berry: I just happen to have no appetite for glitz and glamour. I like it here. This place has furnished its quota of people who’ve helped each other, cared for each other, and tried to be fair. I have known some of them, living and dead, whom I’ve loved deeply, and being here reminds me of them. This has given my days a quality that they wouldn’t have had if I’d moved away.

There have been some good farmers here. The way of farming that I grew up with was conservative in the best sense. I learned a lot from people in Henry County. Probably all my most influential teachers lived here, when you get right down to it. I owe big debts to teachers in universities, to literary influences, and so on. But it’s the people you listened to as a child whose influence is immeasurable — especially your grandparents, your parents, your older friends. I’ve paid a lot of attention to older people. Of course, not a lot of people here are older than I am anymore, but some are, and I still love to listen to them, to my immense improvement and pleasure.

Fearnside: What are some of the things that they say?

Berry: They tell stories. They talk about relationships. They talk about events that have stuck in their minds. The most important thing is not what they say, but the way they talk. We had a local pattern of speech at one time. Now we’re running out of people who speak it. But there were once people here whose speech was uninfluenced by the media, and it had an immediacy, a loveliness when it was intelligently used, and a great capacity for humor.

Fearnside: A good friend of mine told me that she knows people from Kentucky who have trained themselves not to speak like Kentuckians.

Berry: That was the main goal of the school system: to stop you from talking like a “hick” and get you to speak standard American.

Fearnside: When you speak of what the elders here in Henry County discuss, it reminds me of a line from Barry Lopez’s short-story collection Winter Count: “That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

Berry: I don’t think we’re just stories — we’re living souls, too — but we’d be nothing without stories. Of course, stories that belong to a landscape are different from stories that don’t. In Arctic Dreams Lopez talks about how the Eskimos, the native Alaskan people, have a cultural landscape — the landscape as they know it — that is always a little different from the actual landscape, which nobody ever will fully know.

In a functioning culture the landscape is full of stories. Stories adhere to it. And they’re most interesting when they’re told within the landscape. If, say, an oral-history project records somebody’s story and puts it in the university archives, then it’s a different story. It’s become isolated, misplaced, displaced.

Fearnside: You’re a well-known advocate for local economies, yet you write for a much-wider-than-local audience, which means you must rely on the machinery of the corporate world to get your message out. Is there a contradiction in this, or is it simply an inescapable paradox that you must be pragmatic about?

Berry: There are contradictions in it, no doubt about that. There’s an absolutely lethal contradiction in my driving and flying around to talk about conservation and local economies. But you have to live in the world the way it is. You can’t declare yourself too good for it and move away. You have to carry the effort wherever you can take it. You’ve got to have allies. The thought of the Committees of Correspondence in the American Revolution is never very far from my mind. People have to stay in touch somehow. They have to meet and talk. They have to support each other. But that’s a network, not a community.

Fearnside: I was fortunate once to participate in a barn raising in Idaho. It was an incredible experience of community. With the help of friends and neighbors, using mostly hand-held tools, a couple raised a barn in a day and a half.

Berry: The Amish do it in a day. They belong to a traditional culture that, for a long time, has steadfastly put the community first.

Fearnside: I’ve noticed that the Amish seem less self-conscious than most Americans. Why do you think this is so?

Berry: I’d say that in their community, honesty is the norm. One of the most striking things about the Amish is that their countenances are open. We pity Muslim women for wearing veils, yet almost every face in this country is veiled by suspicion and fear. You can’t walk down a city street and get anybody to look at you. People’s countenances are undercover operations here.

Fearnside: While traveling in the Xinjiang Province of China — which is predominantly Uyghur, a traditional Muslim culture — I was struck by the people’s openness. In particular, the children radiated gaiety and health, just as Amish children do.

Berry: The Amish children are raised at home by two parents. They’re given little jobs to do from the time they’re able to walk, and they’re important to the family economy. They have rules. They’re secure. There are things that they’re not allowed to do. There’s something pitiful about American children who are left to invent a childhood on their own with one parent or none, no community, no relatives, and nothing useful to do. They don’t even go into the woods and hunt.

Fearnside: I fear that my generation may be the last to grow up outdoors. I used to roam for hours, hiking through the fields and woods or bicycling down country roads, completely unsupervised, which is unheard of today. Nowadays a kid is going to grow up sitting in front of a computer screen or listening to an iPod, not climbing trees or even playing ball in the street.

Berry: Young people around here don’t come to the river to swim or fish anymore. Of course, an alarming percentage of Kentucky streams aren’t fit for swimming or fishing.

Fearnside: It seems that we’ve been separated from our local communities by radio, television, and now the Internet. Because these forces come from outside the communities, they often don’t reflect the communities’ values. How can we stay plugged in to information and yet preserve our local connections?

Berry: I don’t know. There’s not much you can do, unless you want to disconnect yourself from those electronic gadgets. I pretty much do. Tanya and I haven’t had a television for a long time; people used to give tv sets to our children, because they felt sorry for us. I think we were given three over the years. I listen to the radio some. I don’t have a computer, and I almost never see a movie. To me this isolation is necessary. It keeps my language available to me in a way that I don’t think it would be if I were full of that public information all the time.

Fearnside: My wife and I enjoy watching movies on dvd, but we find that most mass-media offerings aren’t worth our time.

Berry: To make yourself a passive receptacle for information, or whatever anybody wants to pour into you, is a bad idea. To be informed used to be a meaningful experience; it meant “to be formed from within.” But information now is just a bunch of disconnected data or entertainment and, as such, may be worthless, perhaps harmful. As T.S. Eliot wrote a long time ago, information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.

(hit link to read more)

via www.thesunmagazine.org

Song for the Luddites - Lord Byron

"Song for the Luddites" Lord Byron
[sent in a letter to Thomas Moore, 24 Dec. 1816]

. . Are you not near the Luddites? By the Lord! If there's a row, but I'll be among ye! How go on the weavers--the breakers of frames--the Lutherans of politics--the reformers?

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
     So we, boys, we
   Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
   We will fling the winding-sheet
   O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.
Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
    Yet this is the dew
   Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Greenpeace raids the cloud

(img from Wired.com)

In late 2006, I wrote a post about the energy consumption of modern computing plants, in which I made a prediction:

As soon as activists, and the public in general, begin to understand how much electricity is wasted by computing and communication systems - and the consequences of that waste for the environment and in particular global warming - they'll begin demanding that the makers and users of information technology improve efficiency dramatically. Greenpeace and its rainbow warriors will soon storm the data center - your data center.

Soon is now. Today, Greenpeace issued a report on "cloud computing and its contribution to climate change," in which it specifically targets big cloud operators like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft. The report is timed to coincide with the launch of Apple's iPad, an event that underscores just how dramatically personal computing has changed, and expanded, over the last few years. Many of us now own a slew of computers in various forms - desktops, laptops, smartphones, iPods, tablets, e-readers, gaming consoles - that don't just suck up electricity themselves but are connected to the vast cloud grid that also consumes enormous amounts of energy. Drawing mainly on a 2008 analysis by the Climate Group and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, Greenpeace predicts that the electricity consumed by the cloud - defined as both Internet data centers and the communications network that connects all of us to those centers - will rise from 623 billion kWh in 2007 to 1,964 billion kWh in 2020.

The rise of cloud computing is a two-edged sword when it comes to energy consumption and related carbon emissions. On the one hand, since electricity is a critical component of the cost of running a cloud operation, major cloud computing providers like Google and Microsoft have a big economic incentive to become more energy efficient, and they have been admirably aggressive in pioneering technologies that reduce energy use. The energy-conserving equipment, designs, and processes that the cloud giants invent should in time spread throughout the information technology industry, making computing in general much more energy efficient. At the same time, however, the free data and services supplied through the cloud are rapidly expanding the scope of computing and its attractiveness - people use computers, particularly internet-connected computers, much more than in the past - and so even as computing is becoming more efficient, when measured by units of output, the dramatic expansion in its use means that it is, in absolute terms, sucking up much more electricity than it has in the past, a trend that promises to accelerate pretty much indefinitely.

What that means is that, as the Greenpeace report makes clear, both the economic and the political stakes involved in mitigating the environmental impact of the cloud will increase. Greenpeace argues that what's important is not only the efficiency of data centers but the sources of the power they use. The heavenly cloud, it turns out, runs largely on earthbound coal. In this regard, it singles out Facebook for criticism:

Facebook’s decision to build its own highly-efficient data centre in Oregon that will be substantially powered by coal-fired electricity clearly underscores the relative priority for many cloud companies. Increasing the energy efficiency of its servers and reducing the energy footprint of the infrastructure of data centres are clearly to be commended, but efficiency by itself is not green if you are simply working to maximise output from the cheapest and dirtiest energy source available.

Greenpeace also links Apple's decision to locate a huge cloud data center in North Carolina to that state's cheap electricity supplies, which come mainly from coal-fired plants. Other companies, including Google, also run big data center operations in the Carolinas. Noting that the IT industry "holds many of the keys to reaching our climate goals," Greenpeace says that it is pursuing a "Cool IT Campaign" that is intended to pressure the industry to "put forward solutions to achieve economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions reductions and to be strong advocates for policies that combat climate change and increase the use of renewable energy."

The Greenpeace action promises to intensify the public's focus on the cloud's environmental shadow. But while Greenpeace's main target appears to be the big cloud providers, its report also suggests, if only in passing, that the devices that all of us use to connect to the cloud actually consume more energy than the cloud itself. Those of us who spend a large proportion of our waking hours peering into multiple computer screens can't offload responsibility for the environmental consequences of our habits to companies like Google and Facebook. The cloud, after all, exists for us.

via www.roughtype.com

Eurozine - On the post-city - Daniel Miller

As the ideological frenzy of modernism gives way to "content management systems", and as global megacities render the urban grid and its certainties obsolete, societies of discipline become societies of control. Daniel Miller cracks open the password protected "post-city".

via www.eurozine.com

[interesting article]

žižek, tarkovsky, and the postindustrial wasteland

"...The ultimate Tarkovskian landscape is that of a river or pond close to some forest,full of the debris of human artifices—old concrete blocks, rusty metal. The postindustrial wasteland of the Second World is the privileged “evental site,” the symptomatic point out of which one can undermine the totality of today’s global capitalism. One should love this world, with its grey, decaying buildings and sulphuric smell, for all this stands for history, threatened with erasure between the post-historical First World and the pre-historical Third World.

Let’s recall Walter Benjamin’s notion of “natural history” as “renaturalized history”: it takes place when historical artifacts lose their meaningful vitality and are perceived as dead objects, reclaimed by nature
or, in the best case, as monuments of a past dead culture. (For Benjamin, it was in confronting such dead monuments of human history reclaimed by nature that we experience history at its purest.) The paradox here is that this re-naturalization overlaps with its opposite, with denaturalization.
Since culture is for us humans our “second nature,” since we dwell in a living culture, experiencing it as our natural habitat, the re-naturalization of cultural artifacts equals their de-naturalization.
Deprived of their function within a living totality of meaning, artifacts dwell in an inter-space between nature and culture, between life and death, leading a ghost-like existence, belonging neither to nature nor to culture, appearing as something akin to the monstrosity of natural freaks, like a cow with two heads and three legs...."

slavoj žižek "Nature and its Discontents" SubStance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008