I'm so sorry. Of course it happened. I know older people to whom it happened -- including an old friend molested by her uncles -- and it deeply damaged them. Brian's point isn't that it didn't happen -- not at all! HIs point was that it used to be normal for adults and children to have social relationships, and now that has all gone away. Not every adult-child relationship is sexual.
I remember one, Mrs. Styles. When Dad left NASA after the moon program was winding down, we moved to LIttle Rock, AR. First a duplex in the suburbs, then eventually in a rural town about 30 minutes outside of the city, called East End. There, until we we moved to Texarkana in the early 80s, I had an amazing childhood. Nice house (with a pool, even), friends (Shannon, still my bro), and surrounded by acres and acres of forest, in which many an adventure was had. We went to church at Sardis United Methodist Church, with people I know to this day. But one in particular is of the sort described above. Mrs. Styles. I do not know how my parents met her in particular, but she became a caretaker of me and my brother when they were away. She was a widow who lived on a property that, to a young boy, was magical. Local small farm, pond for fishing, all kinds of domestic birds, including a big, cranky gander named John, whom I learned how to handle from Mrs. Styles (basically, pick up a stick and wave it at him, he'd turn tail). I learned some basic farm stuff from her. But also, how this godly, beautiful, kind woman found a place in her heart for these two lads. When we moved away from Little Rock to Texarkana when I was 13, I lost track of her. I would like to know how she fared, and if she has departed and is with my parents, when. I would like to know where her mortal remains lay and one day go to pay her respect. For her love and that remarkable property and its connection to our past as a culture and a species stays with me to this day.
Similar tale from my grandparents on my father's side, but that is a story for another day.
Might be. Sometime after I finish my MDiv and commission, I'm going to use that summer to get some things done. Get my glider cert, get my seaplane cert, and finally complete a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When I return from that, I may go visit Sardis and do a little in-person research. I do not live that far away.
About adult friendships with children: this was true even in the 80s, when I was a kid. I well remember kindly adults like the farmer whose land lay behind our house and who allowed us pesky kids to roam his fields and pick strawberries and took us for rides on his ancient tractor. It's very sad that these days, as stated, the assumption would be that his interest in us was a sick one.
As for social relationships: yes. Read any novel from the 1950s backwards and you are struck by just how much people go out to parties and hang out with each other. It's endless.
I firmly believe that technology has destroyed human relationships by making us less dependent on each other, and much more alone.
When I was in 9th grade in the 1980s, I met a local college student who would come over the house and hang out with me, sometimes after school before my parents got home. He would drive us to the record store and sometimes to social events where the age range was from 14 to 25.
By 2023 standards, people find this weird. Why, he must have been a groomer or a pedo! But he never made a move on me (or, to my knowledge, on any other kids), and he went on to marry an adult woman. We were, at the time, simply all a part of a big community of nerds and geeks in our suburb. We had shared interests in Dungeons & Dragons, punk rock and progressive rock, building and programming your own computer, all stuff that was considered utterly fringe back then. The older dudes never even offered me alcohol or drugs! They weren't after young boys. They were just happy to know anyone who shared these fringe interests, and they were actively building a community at a time when being what we were—dorks—was an invitation to an ass-kicking.
For us younger guys, the older guys were almost inspiring. We could see that they were thriving in college, or held jobs that allowed them to do their thing, and some of them even had (amazingly) girlfriends or wives. Our daily lives were a carnival of bullies and indignities, but none of us contemplated suicide or shooting up the school, because being in a multigenerational friend group was proof we were going to be fine.
I don't know how we get back to normalizing intergenerational socializing and friendships while still protecting vulnerable kids from predatory clergy, coaches, etc., but it would be nice. All the Internet in the world can't give kids what friendships with some kindly, older dorks did for me.
That's great. My sons have an older cousin (7-8 yrs), who is a total free-spirit, driving his parent nuts, doesn't touch drugs or alcohol, but has eclectic tastes. He is a failed actor, writer, director (wouldn't listen to me 10 yrs ago when I told him to focus on producing YouTube videos.....not, artistic enough for him). He's into philosophy and going against the grain. He's my favorite nephew, but highly un-successful, financially. He has started directing HS plays.
He takes my boys out for sushi and hangs out with them every so often. My youngest really needs this interaction, and I encourage it.
I routinely hung out with my nine years older half brother and his friends. That wasn't always the best influence: there was a lot of pot smoking and sexual banter in that bunch (though actual sex happened behind closed doors). I felt somewhat superior to other kids my age because I had older friends and knew about older people things, and I found middle school social life a real immature bore.
When my childhood neighborhood was new (late 50s/early 60) it still had a very active social scene. This was before I was born but my parents and friends' parents reminisced about it -- "the Golden Age of Suburbia"-- and my parents also had pictures of huge parties people had, with neighbors dragging over picnic tables, grills and coolers full of beer. There were also enough non-working wives for a real society of neighbor women doing fun things (and occasionally being mean-mouthed gossips alas) regularly.
You don't have to go back to the age of outhouses and butter churns to find a more sociable friendly world.
In the ‘80s our next door neighbors adopted me. I’d spend hours over there after school. They’d help with homework, etc. They truly became a second family to me and my mom as well since my dad was always gone. He (neighbor) cooked for my wedding reception.
It's important to remember the old ways and the old days. I remember well the stories of my parents growing up in what are now ghost towns (razed to the ground when coal no longer was profitable after WW II), growing up without indoor plumbing, fellow immigrant families all around from all over Europe, hunting and fishing, and living life. It was during the Depression, but they had happy memories to their dying days, and we'd frequently travel back there for reunions--some, for our enormous family, others that would include them, but also anyone else who grew up there.
I do think that there are many, many good things about the past and it's world view. But I also think that, with all memories, they are sweetened by a nostalgia that smooths over the very real downsides, because of the bitterness over the good things we lost.
I would do almost anything to see the sexual revolution gone, along with its attendant evils of abortion, broken families, and the sexual mutilation of children. But I know it didn't arise in a vacuum, and the seeds for the world we see today were planted long ago. And even back then, there was evil. No, it wasn't publicly accepted, and that's not nothing--but it also covered up that rarely were those evils confronted for what they were. In my own family there were dark things that I didn't learn about until years later--in the midst of those happy memories, there were evil men who did awful things.
And the married women who could not deny their husbands sex, but knowing their bodies were so worn out by childbearing that they would probably die with the next baby. And the prostitutes forced into this horrible trade since the dawn of civilization. And the women denied any inheritance or any education or any vote because of their sex. I love my foremothers and their wisdom, but I also know they would have given their eye-teeth to be able to space their pregnancies, vote, inherit, go to school . . .
I was born two days after Rod, and knew even as a much younger person who supported some (certainly not all) aspects of second-wave feminism that the sexual revolution was detrimental: for example, I didn't date in high school because I knew I might be expected by my dates to "go too far" (many years after the fact, I learned that my older sister and her first long-term boyfriend in high school broke up over her refusal to have sex with him). I didn't date until later college, and was almost shocked to learn that some young men expected sex very early in relationships, something I wouldn't even consider until we'd been dating exclusively for at least three months. Though I did not wait for marriage (I might not have minded doing so), the only man I ever had an intimate relationship with eventually became my husband.
I know premarital sex has been going on at least as long as recorded history, but when my parents' generation was young, premarital sex was still fairly taboo. I think the main difference between then and now is shame: if a young woman became pregnant before marriage prior to the 1970s, she usually had a shotgun wedding, went to live with out-of-town relatives, or was sent to a home for unwed mothers. Unless she was married, her baby was placed for adoption. Gen Y started the trend of having their own two-year-old children as members of their wedding parties (if weddings even happen), and I don't understand it at all. Why not go to city hall before the baby is born?
If I had an adult child who became a parent outside of marriage, I wouldn't disown the grandchild (like the Bidens originally did), but I wouldn't host a baby shower, either. It's one thing to help a family member who is a single parent in practical and emotional ways; it's another to pretend that single parenthood is normal and even acceptable.
My mom got pregnant with my older brother in 1962, when she was 20. My dad was the same age. My mom claimed not to know how children were made until she met my father. I sort of believe her. Of course, once my grandfather found out, he gathered all parties together and headed for City Hall.
As the family was rushing out the door, my aunt, then 12 or 13, came home from school and said, "Where's everyone going?"
"Your sister's getting married," snapped my grandmother.
"Can I come?"
Decades later, after my dad retired, my parents had to go to City Hall to get the paperwork for his retirement, including the marriage certificate. After staring into the computer for several minutes, the clerk said, "I'm sorry but there's no record of you being married here in San Francisco."
My mom was flabbergasted. The kindly clerk did so more research and then reported back: "You two weren't married here but in City Hall in San Jose."
So, yes, these sort of thing were huge scandals back in the day. My grandfather, not wishing to run into someone he knew, drove everyone to San Jose, 45 miles south, where they knew no one. My mom, who was probably in a daze, has no recollection of the ceremony, let alone the location. The marriage wasn't perfect but lasted 50 plus years.
Here in culturally conservative West Virginia, almost half of the children are being raised by their grandparents according to an article I read two weeks ago. What a lack of responsibility on the part of the father and mothers. West Virginia has problems but the lack of parental responsibility is the most dire and least easy to solve. How can government action change bad personal behavior?
"Animals move through a world older and more complete than ours".
Behold, Fido and Mittens! If a dog or cat has nothing better to do, it goes for a stroll or takes a nap. It does not obsess about it's done with its life or what tomorrow may bring. Wisdom! Let us be attentive.
"I realize that we could not build some of these churches now"
Eastern Iowa has 140 year old Catholic churches with intricate hand-carved wooden high altars about 30 feet high, comparable to the best in Europe, as the German-Luxembourgen immigrants knew how to do this. They built these monuments to glory of God in their penury, scratching a living from the earth. Their ancestors can hardly keep the lights on.
Still, that's better stewardship than the western side of the state where high altars were chopped down because some poison wind blew across those rolling hills in the late 1960s.
In re: education. My grandparents had eighth-grade educations in single-room country schoolhouses, but could do math in their heads and recite lengthy poetry or history on command. I dare say they knew their catechisms better than many attendees at the recent Vatican Synod, as well. When leafing through very old National Geographic magazines, I was struck at how much higher the quality of the writing was and presumption of cultural literacy and vocabulary among common readers.
Ok, if y’all are interested in this at all, do yourselves a favor and read one of the best short stories ever, Mary Lerner’s “Little Selves,” about the old ways in Ireland, right now:
Ah, thank you for that! I hadn't come across either author or story before, but it's enchanting. I wonder whether Anna in the story was an avatar of the author, and whether Mary Lerner had listened to the tales her own great-aunt told of her Irish childhood.
No one, every one is afraid to go out since COVID, afraid to talk to people they don’t know might be of a different political ideology, or they are too tired from being on Zoom meetings all day.
My parents were not drinkers but they often went to other couples' homes for dinner and music. My dad would take a few of his LP's and after dinner the adults would sit and talk and listen to music (this was in pre-rock n roll days, at least for adults, so the music was generally big band or "pop" vocalists). And if the hosting family had kids, we sometimes went along. And of course we had people over as well. One thing that stands out is that during these get-togethers the TV was almost never on unless the attendees agreed to watch something that everyone wanted to see. Never cop shows or sit-coms that I can recall -- mostly variety or musical shows.
When I was a young lawyer in NY in the 1990s people still had them. I don't recall dancing, but there were cocktails and talking, background music, light food. Kind of a cocktail party but not very formalized. I think what killed it was the rise of the internet, which made more people entertain themselves even than television did. I remember there being less of it once the internet got well and truly entrenched in the 00s, and then almost none of it in the teens.
We are going to a friend’s house tonight, but it’s very rare to be invited over to anyone’s house. ‘Busy’ is a lifestyle for a lot of people. If it’s not work, it’s family obligations or activity obligations.
Our generation moved around a lot more than our parent’s generation and building community isn’t especially easy when you are moving from job to job. I’m kind of done putting myself out there to meet new people ‘again’ as we’ve moved from place to place over the years. It’s really hard to keep investing yourself in people you never hear from after you’ve moved. Facebook ‘friends’ just isn’t a real relationship.
That’s something I’m sure my son is sick of me preaching.....go to church and keep building yourself a community of good people. We’ve laid a foundation for him, but he’s going to need people as he gets older. That’s a big reason why we don’t move out of our area now that the state has gone insane. We have friends and a community. That has intrinsic value.
I’m very disappointed that I have no reason to wear a cocktail dress now that I’m an adult. I feel cheated with ‘yoga pants’ and Netflix.
But then I remember that the parents of my generation are ‘helicopter parents’ and that’s where the time goes. Sports games and homework and other activities. It’s hard not to get sucked into that culture because it’s everywhere as a parent.
Too many disparate things covered there, way too many, to respond to each one, or even a few of them. So I will just make the general observation that struck me when reading through them.
History is trade-offs. It just is. Things change. Some of the changes that are "better" result in losing other things that you like but are incompatible with the new, "better", thing. I'm well aware that lots of people wish that this were not the case, that we could have the "better" thing without losing the other thing that we liked, but it doesn't work that way -- there are trade-offs. Just a few examples ...
The both commercial and scientific restructuring of the agricultural sector led to much more efficient food production and distribution, which lowered food cost, which resulted in the population boom we have seen, life span increases, all kinds of measures of sturdier, healthier people. Of course, more issues come from that, such as obesity, overpopulation (disputed, and not just from the right -- see Matthew Yglesias), environmental despoilation, GMOs and related issues and so on but also massively decreased hunger, starvation, death from want of food. But the nature of agriculture, and the rural farmer culture that went with it, changed irrevocably. It's a trade-off.
The sexual revolution, again a combination of technological and social changes, led to much higher workforce participation by women, which led to greater economic freedom and independence for women, and greater equality between the sexes than any prior period in history. At the same time, it lowered birth rates and marriage rates, raised divorce rates, increased rates of STDs, led to the rise of a sexuality culture that prevails today in the popular culture and so on. But the benefits were very real, as well as the costs. Not everything that came of it was good, but much that came of it is now central to American life, especially for the female part of the population, and is not negotiable regardless of the "cost" required to attain it. It's a trade-off.
Trade-offs are imperfect by their nature. Both of the examples I note above, as well as the other areas addressed in the sections excerpted in the post, involve areas that are deeply disputed and contested, and I am well aware that my own descriptions represent only one way to characterize these things, and a way that would be vehemently disputed by others. Such is the nature of trade-offs, and the nature of history as well.
And one can argue that the older set of trade-offs was better than the newer one -- but, again, that's a question of personal preferences and opinion. Human nature is imperfect, and so each set of trade-offs at any point in time will have its own negative aspects, its own downsides in the trade-off which is then being made. There is no "optimal solution", because human beings are very sub-optimal creatures, and in any case there is no agreement, and likely never will be, about what that optimal solution would be anyway.
I think therefore that it is fine to note that one dislikes the current set of trade-offs, or that one wishes the upsides of the current system were possible without the downside trade-offs, or try to mitigate some of those trade-offs or what have you, but that is just one opinion among many. Waxing nostalgic about the prior system of trade-offs is relatively pointless in itself, because that system represented the equilibrium of trade-offs that, for a variety of reasons (not all of them good), prevailed during earlier historical periods, and for which there was a litany of downsides, some of which were removed by our more recently achieved trade-offs, which introduced different downsides. In the end, it's just expressing a preference for one set of downsides vs another -- which is fine, we all have our preferences, but it isn't very interesting.
More fundamentally I honestly do not think conservatives will get anywhere in the "next phase" of the culture (and related political) sphere by waxing nostalgic about the past. What is needed, urgently, is a model that matches the present conditions and the soon to be future conditions, that does not rest on attacking its fundaments, but offers a different vision for the near future that is positive, and not trying to bring this or that back from the past. This is lacking, and as long as it is lacking, it will be just a series of Man of La Mancha episodes, I think, for the conservatives.
This is very wise, and in many ways the intellectual history of the last 200 years is a history of regret, which is not a fruitful emotion.
However the role that real evil, real worship of death plays in our current--erm--situation is not to be minimized. Do you know about Baby Indi in London? She has what is likely a terminal disease and the NHS wants to kill her. Bambino Gesù, the big children's hospital in Rome, has agreed to treat her until (and if) she dies naturally. Giorgia immediately granted the child Italian citizenship. Naturally the EU got involved, through the Hague. But most of all the British courts weren't having that. Read this story, and soak up the judge's tone: https://apnews.com/article/baby-indi-italy-life-support-76b9fdc69b1580ddf3bd971adc23027b
Now part of this is just fear of being caught with their pants down ("You think you can get better care in ITALY?"), but part of it is something very scary indeed.
More. Peter Singer, the utilitarian monster at Princeton, is now saying there's nothing wrong with zoophilia. This is after pronouncing that human life is not inherently more valuable than any other kind of life. Now, you have to give the guy credit, because this is where John Stuart Mill will inevitably lead.
We all of us benefit from antibiotics, and air conditioning and automatic dishwashers. But our ancestors had something we've lost, and certainly everybody in these boxes knows what it is.
Oh, I forgot. The national conservatives who are willing to trade off I don't know what for something like single-payer had better read this story very carefully. Because this is what you're going to get.
Great comment. One of the big problems with "Progress" is not that it doesn't recognize the trade-offs, but that it assumes that the net change will always show up in the plus column. This figures into why liberals and progressives, and even some progress-minded conservatives, always give nostalgia a negative connotation, when in fact all it really is is homesickness applied to time instead of place. Can homesickness be bad? Of course, if it's so strong as to be depressing or debilitating. But who thinks that homesickness is bad per se? I'd say the same thing applies to nostalgia.
There have been many cases like this. The parents of this 5 year old took him abroad for cancer treatment and the NHS called Interpol who chased the family across Europe. The parents were then jailed.
From a dialectical standpoint, we could also say that a world breaks apart because of its own internal tensions, or when the existing set of tradeoffs becomes untenable. Medieval Christendom produced unity but also a corrupt and political Church, which in turn called forth its own nemesis of the Reformation and subsequent secularism, and so on. it's not that there has ever been a perfect status quo that was merely ruined by something "outside" of itself. We could even say that the Fall of Eve and Adam came about because of the anxiety latent within untested freedom, which was bound to become manifest as sin at some point. In short, the seeds of the present's destruction are always already buried within itself, and it's only a matter of time before they sprout into a different future—and onward turns the karmic wheel, until the end.
It's a good point. Each era's trade-off is temporary, and the inherent tensions eventually pull it apart, leading to a new temporary balance of trade-offs being found for a different era. It's not pleasant when one finds oneself on the side that dislikes the "new" as compared to the old, even when recognizing the benefits and "costs" of both the old and the new systems taken as a whole, but it is an unfortunate reality of life.
Brendan, I agree – I would add, though, that some things don’t need to be trade-offs. I’m grateful for better medical care, but it doesn’t mean we needed to stop visiting our neighbours. We can bring back many of the things we value about the past and retain many of the things we value about the present.
Brian Kaller has an easy writing style, great insights, and should be published.
I am a son of suburbia, one of the most ephemeral lifestyles there is. My parents moved us to Seabrook MD in 1969. Seabrook was 99 % white in those days. Before World War Two, most of Prince George's County was made up of tobacco farms. This part of Maryland had been steeped in a tobacco culture since the 1600s. Nearly three centuries. After the war, the land was butchered up and made into housing developments full of Split-Foyers, Split-Levels, Colonials, Ramblers and Ranchers. Suburbanization was a radical change but when you are a child you don't realize how radical a change had occurred in Seabrook and the surrounding county. Most of the farmers sold out except for a Strawberry farm that catered to suburbanites. I worked at that farm during my senior year in high school. It has since been cut up into housing developments.
Seabrook was a fun place to grow up. It seemed every house in Seabrook had married parents and three children. Children would play tag at night in the summer. The Boys' Club provided sports and many men of the town volunteered to coach. Near the middle of town there was the Green Acres swimming pool that was filled with children in the summer and the blonde-haired children's hair would turn green due to the chlorine. The shopping center had a Grand Union grocery, a Bambino's pizza shop, a wonderful bakery, a record shop, a bank, a barber shop and a Tastee-Freeze, a favorite of mine. The Lanham Inn made a fine pizza. At the southern edge of town was Langway's bar, named for a hockey star. At the west edge of town was the rednecky Princess Garden Inn bar. Seabrook had four elementary schools, two junior highs and one senior high, DuVal.
But demographic change came to Seabrook slowly at first and then rapidly. Worse, almost all the institutions died. The Grand Union died first in the 80s and while the Grand Union franchise still lives, it is small and regional. The Tastee Freeze, Lanham Inn and the Princess Garden Inn died in the 90s. Langway's moved to Crofton and still exists. All the other stores died except the barber shop, still run by an Italian immigrant who is in his eighties. The schools were whittled down due to population decline. DuVal High still exists but is likely to get its name changed. DuVal is named after an obscure Supreme Court Justice appointed by James Madison, Gabriel Duvall. DuVal is in the process of being re-named as Duvall was a large landowner in the old tobacco days with a plantation full of slaves. So he was evil just like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and Lee.
The Seabrook I grew up in is dead as a roadkill deer. That's how suburbia works.
Marvellous writing. I will buy the book when it comes out.
A small point: "...that’s probably not how Homer’s audience saw it. Their descendants, by the time of Euripides or Sophocles, would think differently." The Greeks in the time of Euripides and Sophocles would not have thought so much differently from their Homeric forebears, at least on the matter of who we should sympathise with. It was the coming of Christianity that changed that, and that makes the big difference between us on the one hand, and the Sophoclean / Homeric Greeks on the other.
Re: The Greeks in the time of Euripides and Sophocles would not have thought so much differently from their Homeric forebears, at least on the matter of who we should sympathise with.
Sophocles and Euripides both wrote plays that it's hard to imagine would have been well received in earlier times. The Trojan Women portrays Homer's Greek heroes as brutes. Antigone celebrates individual conscience over obedience to authority. A definite sea change came over Greek culture in that era-- in fact something similar affected most of the civilizations of the mid-first millennium BC, giving us the Hebrew prophets, Zoroaster, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism and Taoism.
Nic T and JonF311, I agree more with Jon here, but perhaps Euripides and Sophocles were the start of a trend that reached its full fruition in Christianity.
I don’t think I can help, but this writer is so sane. I long for a Ben Op community, which is what I think he is describing. I want to get this book when it’s published.
“In a few generations we have become the most dependent creatures ever to exist outside of zoos.”
And that is perhaps the best description of how the Elites and Oligarchs view us, as a working zoo which is the inefficient engine for their Great Reset and NWO.
I'm going to push back a bit on the notion we're exceptionally dependent today-- because we've long been so. We humans are social animals. We need a finely woven social net around us, and did even way back in the Paleolithic. A lone human permanently cut off from others would not have lasted long when glaciers still towered over Europe and North America. And for some millennia now we've needed assorted domesticated creatures, and of course we're dependent on complexities of the Earth, and on the Sun.
JonF311, humans naturally live in families and tribes, but there is a world of difference between working alongside your kin to bring in the harvest versus depending on a global network of machines for your day-to-day needs.
OK, but nowadays we have the latter situation-- and the only way to return to the past set of circumstances involves mass death on a scale that would render trivial every other dying and killing event in our history summed together.
There was much indeed that was beautiful about old Ireland, and my husband's family celebrates it. But there's also the deep mourning that runs throughout Ireland because of the Great Famine (potato blight) from 1840-1852. One million died, another million (at least) fled the country, desperately searching for food, and a future somewhere else. They lost one-fourth of their entire population in those terrible years, and it spurred a century long population decline. Between 1840 and 1940, the population of Ireland dropped from 8.5 million to 4.5 million. When life was good in the agricultural world, it was very good; but when it went bad, it was deadly.
I am in no way minimizing or overlooking the horrific reality of the Great Famine, but it is not unimaginable to project that, given our current reliance on 'made' and 'provided' food (with the emphasis in both on the silent 'not by us'), our modern wayward world could enact this famine in far less time just by losing access to long-haul shipping capacity. The evidence of our absolute reliance on being provided with food - and of our (general) utter ignorance of how to reliably provide our own - was on full display during some brief moments of Covidtime. And it was sobering.
Wendell Berry has long said that our utter dependence on the petro-chemical industry for our food production and distribution should be considered a national security concern.
The problem is that there isn't enough arable land in the world to feed 7.9 billion people using "old-fashioned" farming. It wasn't until the industrial revolution brought about mechanized farming, imported fertilizers, and then began producing petro-chemical fertilizers that the earth's population began growing exponentially. The world's population was about 1 billion in the 1820s; in 1961 it reached 3 billion, and today, we're at 7.9 billion. Without that petro-chemical industry, there will be a massive die off, and it won't all happen where we won't see it or experience it. That or soylent green.
It could be. Then again, I can't think of any other explanation for the massive population boom beginning in the 19th century. It's not like everyone was on birth control before. Agricultural yield improved dramatically.
Populations began to grow in the 1700s, and that may be due to the integration of American crops into old World agriculture, notably in China. In the late 19th century the sanitary revolution, beginning with simple low tech measures like making sure human waste did not pollute water sources, sent childhood mortality rates plummeting. Widespread, sometimes mandatory, smallpox vaccination played a roll too. But we did need more food to feed all the extra people who survived childhood. Some of that came from the opening of the American, Canadian, Argentine and Australian prairie's to intensive agriculture.
The point is not about the petro-chemical industry per se, but about the fact that we have grown completely dependent on it. If something were to happen to it, or to our grids that run it, we'd be doomed. We should never have allowed ourselves to get to that point to begin with, Green Revolution or not. Done correctly, small scale farming can be just as productive and efficient as industrial farming, and it should have been given the opportunity to demonstrate that alongside Big Agra, but the "get big or get out" mentality precluded it. As usual, "bigger-stronger-faster" prevailed without much thought for the downstream ramifications.
But it was the same then, too. As Derek says below, throughout the agricultural millennia, most people were one bad crop away from hunger, one bad year away from starvation. There were no backups. The medieval chroniclers logged famine years, and they were horrendous. The Great Famine started with bad weather in spring 1315. Crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer harvest in 1317, and Europe did not fully recover until 1322. Crop failures were not the only problem; cattle disease caused sheep and cattle numbers to fall as much as 80%. People, if not starving to death, were literally living on grass, bark, and whatever roots they could find.
We are still that way, we just like to pretend we're not.
All true! But imagine: would a woke college kid know how to ID an edible root or mushroom if that was the only possibility to eat for some span of time? In so many ways we are so much more ignorant of nature's options (inadequate though they may ultimately be in a situation of crop-ruining weather and extended crop failure).
In old Russia scurvy was rampant among the upper classes during the long winter. Peter the Great's older brother Feodor III died of it. But Russian peasants were much less afflicted-- they knew various oldball wild foods, like bark bread and cedar sprigs, which were rich in Vitamin C (of course they didn't understand that detail) , things the boyars would never touch.
The Roman Empire came into being in large part because the Romans needed secure sources of grain to feed themselves-- and secure seaways to ship it. In the later Middle Ages a long distance grain trade developed with grain grown in Poland and Ukraine and this played a role in the rise of capitalism during the era. By the later 18th century government were going to great lengths (and into debt) to ensure there was enough bread when local sources had a bad year.
As many of you normals know, ADD drugs have been unavailable at worst, possibly available, at best, for at least a year. The uncertain ability to get medications one needs to live a life above the vegetating level is bad enough, but what nags at me is that a society which works has a dependability built into it. Things function reliably, and when they don't, they get fixed, quickly.
What we are going through with ADD drugs reminds me uncomfortably of memories I have of reading about shortfalls in production, and therefore shortages of things for sale on a shelf, in the dying Soviet Union. That's bad enough, but what is unnerving and extremely soviet is that no one seems to have an explanation for it. People have hypotheses, but truly, no one seems to know. It would be a strange but undeniable comfort to have it all explained by villainy or thus far successfully hidden f*ckuppery. I haven't checked on this in a week, so maybe a reason has been unearthed. Meanwhile, you can think of me as a canary in a coal mine, sick, but still with a song in my heart.
My paternal great grandfather fought in The War of Failed Southern Rebellion ( wrong side, natch ). I know almost nothing about him but his name, and that he had two children, my grandfather, Claudius, and my great aunt, Viola. His youth was interrupted when the Union Army grabbed his farm in northern Virginny, but his name choices for his two children does tend to vindicate the notion that our forebears had far more developed literacy than most of us have.
Which one? I'm opaque, so it may be obvious and I don't see it. I talked to a pharmacist about the psychostimulant I do best with, and he told me that for reasons I probably didn't get clearly, it goes back to the pandemic. If I understood him correctly, the companies which make these drugs got sloppy with their paperwork, and the FDA is making them do the protracted, pointless crawl which the FDA usually does.
Here's a great story, about which I know no more than the following: circa 1970, because of the national hysteria about drug use in young people, the FDA took Ritalin off the market for awhile. There was a neurologist in upstate New York, a man ahead of his time by thirty years, who had been using it with tremendous success to treat traumatic brain injury patients clinically. He was enraged by the FDA's move, and unwilling to let his TBI patients rot. He started making trips to Europe, where it was still available, smuggling it back into America, and selling it at cost to his patients. He was risking not only his medical license, of course, but many years in federal prison. He had great moral courage, and never got caught.
Not too long ago most people were one bad crop away from hunger. The Irish diaspora altered many different parts of the world. Massachusetts. New York. Chicago. Australia. Glasgow. Liverpool doubled in population in just a couple of years. I believe three of the four Beatles are primarily Irish by blood.
Not discounting the effects of the potato blight but wasn't much of the resulting famine due to hoarding and distribution, i.e., the English overseers keeping the remaining crops for export?
Correct. It was a man-made famine. There was plenty of food to feed the Irish. The English leadership ignored their pleas for help because the Irish were considered deplorable. Sound familiar?
Many landlords didn't want to pay the poor law tax so they shipped the Irish to Canada and America in the infamous "coffin ships." Even in modern times, listening to a CD of live performances of The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, the bitterness of the Irish remains in the crosstalk of the musicians. Not that Ireland doesn't mind English tourists these days.
Kaller's work is very good stuff. I hope he finds a publisher.
I read a lot of this sort of writing, both US and UK, and one such book I would highly recommend is Charles Fish's "In Good Hands." On the UK side the natural place to start would be Ronald Blythe's classic "Akenfield." Neither book is sentimental about the past, but they don't crow about how much better things are today either. In short, they recognize the trade-offs for what they are. And of course you find these same sorts of observations in all of Wendell Berry's work.
The book is beautifully written and sadly describes an Ireland that will never exist again, if, in fact, as a country, it ever did. Ireland is now the "woke" capital of Europe as well described in this article from The European Conservative. Hard to believe what has happened to this country.
It also includes a statement which I'm sure accurately describes the sincere belief of the author (and probably the majority of those who subscribes to Rod's substack) as a good Christian but which I believe represents his and your weakness in truly fighting the woke ideology that has taken over the West. "We can and should treat people as equals, if we mean under the law or in the eyes of God as fellow human souls making their way through earth," It sounds wonderful in theory and is suicidal in secular practice.
If by "treating people as equals", he means the "golden rule," of course we should. Christ himself gave that instruction. But we also have a duty to the truth, God's truth above all. Sin, delusion, lies, none of that should be honored, not even to preserve someone's feelings.
I'm so sorry. Of course it happened. I know older people to whom it happened -- including an old friend molested by her uncles -- and it deeply damaged them. Brian's point isn't that it didn't happen -- not at all! HIs point was that it used to be normal for adults and children to have social relationships, and now that has all gone away. Not every adult-child relationship is sexual.
What a heartbreaking story, and far too common. I am sorry for your memories.
I remember one, Mrs. Styles. When Dad left NASA after the moon program was winding down, we moved to LIttle Rock, AR. First a duplex in the suburbs, then eventually in a rural town about 30 minutes outside of the city, called East End. There, until we we moved to Texarkana in the early 80s, I had an amazing childhood. Nice house (with a pool, even), friends (Shannon, still my bro), and surrounded by acres and acres of forest, in which many an adventure was had. We went to church at Sardis United Methodist Church, with people I know to this day. But one in particular is of the sort described above. Mrs. Styles. I do not know how my parents met her in particular, but she became a caretaker of me and my brother when they were away. She was a widow who lived on a property that, to a young boy, was magical. Local small farm, pond for fishing, all kinds of domestic birds, including a big, cranky gander named John, whom I learned how to handle from Mrs. Styles (basically, pick up a stick and wave it at him, he'd turn tail). I learned some basic farm stuff from her. But also, how this godly, beautiful, kind woman found a place in her heart for these two lads. When we moved away from Little Rock to Texarkana when I was 13, I lost track of her. I would like to know how she fared, and if she has departed and is with my parents, when. I would like to know where her mortal remains lay and one day go to pay her respect. For her love and that remarkable property and its connection to our past as a culture and a species stays with me to this day.
Similar tale from my grandparents on my father's side, but that is a story for another day.
Could one of these be your Mrs. Styles, or at least a relative?
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=&middlename=&lastname=Styles&birthyear=&birthyearfilter=&deathyear=&deathyearfilter=&location=East+End%2C+Saline+County%2C+Arkansas%2C+USA&locationId=city_10777&memorialid=&mcid=&linkedToName=&datefilter=&orderby=r&plot=
Might be. Sometime after I finish my MDiv and commission, I'm going to use that summer to get some things done. Get my glider cert, get my seaplane cert, and finally complete a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When I return from that, I may go visit Sardis and do a little in-person research. I do not live that far away.
Thank you.
Wow. I'm sold. I'll buy it.
About adult friendships with children: this was true even in the 80s, when I was a kid. I well remember kindly adults like the farmer whose land lay behind our house and who allowed us pesky kids to roam his fields and pick strawberries and took us for rides on his ancient tractor. It's very sad that these days, as stated, the assumption would be that his interest in us was a sick one.
As for social relationships: yes. Read any novel from the 1950s backwards and you are struck by just how much people go out to parties and hang out with each other. It's endless.
I firmly believe that technology has destroyed human relationships by making us less dependent on each other, and much more alone.
When I was in 9th grade in the 1980s, I met a local college student who would come over the house and hang out with me, sometimes after school before my parents got home. He would drive us to the record store and sometimes to social events where the age range was from 14 to 25.
By 2023 standards, people find this weird. Why, he must have been a groomer or a pedo! But he never made a move on me (or, to my knowledge, on any other kids), and he went on to marry an adult woman. We were, at the time, simply all a part of a big community of nerds and geeks in our suburb. We had shared interests in Dungeons & Dragons, punk rock and progressive rock, building and programming your own computer, all stuff that was considered utterly fringe back then. The older dudes never even offered me alcohol or drugs! They weren't after young boys. They were just happy to know anyone who shared these fringe interests, and they were actively building a community at a time when being what we were—dorks—was an invitation to an ass-kicking.
For us younger guys, the older guys were almost inspiring. We could see that they were thriving in college, or held jobs that allowed them to do their thing, and some of them even had (amazingly) girlfriends or wives. Our daily lives were a carnival of bullies and indignities, but none of us contemplated suicide or shooting up the school, because being in a multigenerational friend group was proof we were going to be fine.
I don't know how we get back to normalizing intergenerational socializing and friendships while still protecting vulnerable kids from predatory clergy, coaches, etc., but it would be nice. All the Internet in the world can't give kids what friendships with some kindly, older dorks did for me.
That's great. My sons have an older cousin (7-8 yrs), who is a total free-spirit, driving his parent nuts, doesn't touch drugs or alcohol, but has eclectic tastes. He is a failed actor, writer, director (wouldn't listen to me 10 yrs ago when I told him to focus on producing YouTube videos.....not, artistic enough for him). He's into philosophy and going against the grain. He's my favorite nephew, but highly un-successful, financially. He has started directing HS plays.
He takes my boys out for sushi and hangs out with them every so often. My youngest really needs this interaction, and I encourage it.
I routinely hung out with my nine years older half brother and his friends. That wasn't always the best influence: there was a lot of pot smoking and sexual banter in that bunch (though actual sex happened behind closed doors). I felt somewhat superior to other kids my age because I had older friends and knew about older people things, and I found middle school social life a real immature bore.
When my childhood neighborhood was new (late 50s/early 60) it still had a very active social scene. This was before I was born but my parents and friends' parents reminisced about it -- "the Golden Age of Suburbia"-- and my parents also had pictures of huge parties people had, with neighbors dragging over picnic tables, grills and coolers full of beer. There were also enough non-working wives for a real society of neighbor women doing fun things (and occasionally being mean-mouthed gossips alas) regularly.
You don't have to go back to the age of outhouses and butter churns to find a more sociable friendly world.
In the ‘80s our next door neighbors adopted me. I’d spend hours over there after school. They’d help with homework, etc. They truly became a second family to me and my mom as well since my dad was always gone. He (neighbor) cooked for my wedding reception.
Oh Susanna, thank you! Send me your e-mail address, and as soon as it’s published I’ll let you know.
It's important to remember the old ways and the old days. I remember well the stories of my parents growing up in what are now ghost towns (razed to the ground when coal no longer was profitable after WW II), growing up without indoor plumbing, fellow immigrant families all around from all over Europe, hunting and fishing, and living life. It was during the Depression, but they had happy memories to their dying days, and we'd frequently travel back there for reunions--some, for our enormous family, others that would include them, but also anyone else who grew up there.
I do think that there are many, many good things about the past and it's world view. But I also think that, with all memories, they are sweetened by a nostalgia that smooths over the very real downsides, because of the bitterness over the good things we lost.
I would do almost anything to see the sexual revolution gone, along with its attendant evils of abortion, broken families, and the sexual mutilation of children. But I know it didn't arise in a vacuum, and the seeds for the world we see today were planted long ago. And even back then, there was evil. No, it wasn't publicly accepted, and that's not nothing--but it also covered up that rarely were those evils confronted for what they were. In my own family there were dark things that I didn't learn about until years later--in the midst of those happy memories, there were evil men who did awful things.
And the married women who could not deny their husbands sex, but knowing their bodies were so worn out by childbearing that they would probably die with the next baby. And the prostitutes forced into this horrible trade since the dawn of civilization. And the women denied any inheritance or any education or any vote because of their sex. I love my foremothers and their wisdom, but I also know they would have given their eye-teeth to be able to space their pregnancies, vote, inherit, go to school . . .
I was born two days after Rod, and knew even as a much younger person who supported some (certainly not all) aspects of second-wave feminism that the sexual revolution was detrimental: for example, I didn't date in high school because I knew I might be expected by my dates to "go too far" (many years after the fact, I learned that my older sister and her first long-term boyfriend in high school broke up over her refusal to have sex with him). I didn't date until later college, and was almost shocked to learn that some young men expected sex very early in relationships, something I wouldn't even consider until we'd been dating exclusively for at least three months. Though I did not wait for marriage (I might not have minded doing so), the only man I ever had an intimate relationship with eventually became my husband.
I know premarital sex has been going on at least as long as recorded history, but when my parents' generation was young, premarital sex was still fairly taboo. I think the main difference between then and now is shame: if a young woman became pregnant before marriage prior to the 1970s, she usually had a shotgun wedding, went to live with out-of-town relatives, or was sent to a home for unwed mothers. Unless she was married, her baby was placed for adoption. Gen Y started the trend of having their own two-year-old children as members of their wedding parties (if weddings even happen), and I don't understand it at all. Why not go to city hall before the baby is born?
If I had an adult child who became a parent outside of marriage, I wouldn't disown the grandchild (like the Bidens originally did), but I wouldn't host a baby shower, either. It's one thing to help a family member who is a single parent in practical and emotional ways; it's another to pretend that single parenthood is normal and even acceptable.
My mom got pregnant with my older brother in 1962, when she was 20. My dad was the same age. My mom claimed not to know how children were made until she met my father. I sort of believe her. Of course, once my grandfather found out, he gathered all parties together and headed for City Hall.
As the family was rushing out the door, my aunt, then 12 or 13, came home from school and said, "Where's everyone going?"
"Your sister's getting married," snapped my grandmother.
"Can I come?"
Decades later, after my dad retired, my parents had to go to City Hall to get the paperwork for his retirement, including the marriage certificate. After staring into the computer for several minutes, the clerk said, "I'm sorry but there's no record of you being married here in San Francisco."
My mom was flabbergasted. The kindly clerk did so more research and then reported back: "You two weren't married here but in City Hall in San Jose."
So, yes, these sort of thing were huge scandals back in the day. My grandfather, not wishing to run into someone he knew, drove everyone to San Jose, 45 miles south, where they knew no one. My mom, who was probably in a daze, has no recollection of the ceremony, let alone the location. The marriage wasn't perfect but lasted 50 plus years.
Re: Gen Y started the trend of having their own two-year-old children as members of their wedding parties
No, not Gen Y, Gen X. In 1985 friends my age (18) married with their three month old son featured at the ceremony. Though at least they married.
Here in culturally conservative West Virginia, almost half of the children are being raised by their grandparents according to an article I read two weeks ago. What a lack of responsibility on the part of the father and mothers. West Virginia has problems but the lack of parental responsibility is the most dire and least easy to solve. How can government action change bad personal behavior?
"Animals move through a world older and more complete than ours".
Behold, Fido and Mittens! If a dog or cat has nothing better to do, it goes for a stroll or takes a nap. It does not obsess about it's done with its life or what tomorrow may bring. Wisdom! Let us be attentive.
"I realize that we could not build some of these churches now"
Eastern Iowa has 140 year old Catholic churches with intricate hand-carved wooden high altars about 30 feet high, comparable to the best in Europe, as the German-Luxembourgen immigrants knew how to do this. They built these monuments to glory of God in their penury, scratching a living from the earth. Their ancestors can hardly keep the lights on.
Still, that's better stewardship than the western side of the state where high altars were chopped down because some poison wind blew across those rolling hills in the late 1960s.
In re: education. My grandparents had eighth-grade educations in single-room country schoolhouses, but could do math in their heads and recite lengthy poetry or history on command. I dare say they knew their catechisms better than many attendees at the recent Vatican Synod, as well. When leafing through very old National Geographic magazines, I was struck at how much higher the quality of the writing was and presumption of cultural literacy and vocabulary among common readers.
Throwing out or chopping down old altars. It seems like the ultimate to human eyes.
One of those desecrated churches has a picture in the foyer of what it looked like pre-wreckovation. Today it has all the charm of an airplane hangar.
Ok, if y’all are interested in this at all, do yourselves a favor and read one of the best short stories ever, Mary Lerner’s “Little Selves,” about the old ways in Ireland, right now:
https://archive.org/details/LittleSelves
Ah, thank you for that! I hadn't come across either author or story before, but it's enchanting. I wonder whether Anna in the story was an avatar of the author, and whether Mary Lerner had listened to the tales her own great-aunt told of her Irish childhood.
Adrian, I'll check it out -- thank you!
My parents use to get dressed up to go out to parties and smoke and drink and dance. Who has adult parties anymore?
No one, every one is afraid to go out since COVID, afraid to talk to people they don’t know might be of a different political ideology, or they are too tired from being on Zoom meetings all day.
Ha, I remember when ladies would buy a “cocktail dress”
My parents were not drinkers but they often went to other couples' homes for dinner and music. My dad would take a few of his LP's and after dinner the adults would sit and talk and listen to music (this was in pre-rock n roll days, at least for adults, so the music was generally big band or "pop" vocalists). And if the hosting family had kids, we sometimes went along. And of course we had people over as well. One thing that stands out is that during these get-togethers the TV was almost never on unless the attendees agreed to watch something that everyone wanted to see. Never cop shows or sit-coms that I can recall -- mostly variety or musical shows.
They do and it's called Halloween.
When I was a young lawyer in NY in the 1990s people still had them. I don't recall dancing, but there were cocktails and talking, background music, light food. Kind of a cocktail party but not very formalized. I think what killed it was the rise of the internet, which made more people entertain themselves even than television did. I remember there being less of it once the internet got well and truly entrenched in the 00s, and then almost none of it in the teens.
We are going to a friend’s house tonight, but it’s very rare to be invited over to anyone’s house. ‘Busy’ is a lifestyle for a lot of people. If it’s not work, it’s family obligations or activity obligations.
Our generation moved around a lot more than our parent’s generation and building community isn’t especially easy when you are moving from job to job. I’m kind of done putting myself out there to meet new people ‘again’ as we’ve moved from place to place over the years. It’s really hard to keep investing yourself in people you never hear from after you’ve moved. Facebook ‘friends’ just isn’t a real relationship.
That’s something I’m sure my son is sick of me preaching.....go to church and keep building yourself a community of good people. We’ve laid a foundation for him, but he’s going to need people as he gets older. That’s a big reason why we don’t move out of our area now that the state has gone insane. We have friends and a community. That has intrinsic value.
I’m very disappointed that I have no reason to wear a cocktail dress now that I’m an adult. I feel cheated with ‘yoga pants’ and Netflix.
But then I remember that the parents of my generation are ‘helicopter parents’ and that’s where the time goes. Sports games and homework and other activities. It’s hard not to get sucked into that culture because it’s everywhere as a parent.
Too many disparate things covered there, way too many, to respond to each one, or even a few of them. So I will just make the general observation that struck me when reading through them.
History is trade-offs. It just is. Things change. Some of the changes that are "better" result in losing other things that you like but are incompatible with the new, "better", thing. I'm well aware that lots of people wish that this were not the case, that we could have the "better" thing without losing the other thing that we liked, but it doesn't work that way -- there are trade-offs. Just a few examples ...
The both commercial and scientific restructuring of the agricultural sector led to much more efficient food production and distribution, which lowered food cost, which resulted in the population boom we have seen, life span increases, all kinds of measures of sturdier, healthier people. Of course, more issues come from that, such as obesity, overpopulation (disputed, and not just from the right -- see Matthew Yglesias), environmental despoilation, GMOs and related issues and so on but also massively decreased hunger, starvation, death from want of food. But the nature of agriculture, and the rural farmer culture that went with it, changed irrevocably. It's a trade-off.
The sexual revolution, again a combination of technological and social changes, led to much higher workforce participation by women, which led to greater economic freedom and independence for women, and greater equality between the sexes than any prior period in history. At the same time, it lowered birth rates and marriage rates, raised divorce rates, increased rates of STDs, led to the rise of a sexuality culture that prevails today in the popular culture and so on. But the benefits were very real, as well as the costs. Not everything that came of it was good, but much that came of it is now central to American life, especially for the female part of the population, and is not negotiable regardless of the "cost" required to attain it. It's a trade-off.
Trade-offs are imperfect by their nature. Both of the examples I note above, as well as the other areas addressed in the sections excerpted in the post, involve areas that are deeply disputed and contested, and I am well aware that my own descriptions represent only one way to characterize these things, and a way that would be vehemently disputed by others. Such is the nature of trade-offs, and the nature of history as well.
And one can argue that the older set of trade-offs was better than the newer one -- but, again, that's a question of personal preferences and opinion. Human nature is imperfect, and so each set of trade-offs at any point in time will have its own negative aspects, its own downsides in the trade-off which is then being made. There is no "optimal solution", because human beings are very sub-optimal creatures, and in any case there is no agreement, and likely never will be, about what that optimal solution would be anyway.
I think therefore that it is fine to note that one dislikes the current set of trade-offs, or that one wishes the upsides of the current system were possible without the downside trade-offs, or try to mitigate some of those trade-offs or what have you, but that is just one opinion among many. Waxing nostalgic about the prior system of trade-offs is relatively pointless in itself, because that system represented the equilibrium of trade-offs that, for a variety of reasons (not all of them good), prevailed during earlier historical periods, and for which there was a litany of downsides, some of which were removed by our more recently achieved trade-offs, which introduced different downsides. In the end, it's just expressing a preference for one set of downsides vs another -- which is fine, we all have our preferences, but it isn't very interesting.
More fundamentally I honestly do not think conservatives will get anywhere in the "next phase" of the culture (and related political) sphere by waxing nostalgic about the past. What is needed, urgently, is a model that matches the present conditions and the soon to be future conditions, that does not rest on attacking its fundaments, but offers a different vision for the near future that is positive, and not trying to bring this or that back from the past. This is lacking, and as long as it is lacking, it will be just a series of Man of La Mancha episodes, I think, for the conservatives.
This is very wise, and in many ways the intellectual history of the last 200 years is a history of regret, which is not a fruitful emotion.
However the role that real evil, real worship of death plays in our current--erm--situation is not to be minimized. Do you know about Baby Indi in London? She has what is likely a terminal disease and the NHS wants to kill her. Bambino Gesù, the big children's hospital in Rome, has agreed to treat her until (and if) she dies naturally. Giorgia immediately granted the child Italian citizenship. Naturally the EU got involved, through the Hague. But most of all the British courts weren't having that. Read this story, and soak up the judge's tone: https://apnews.com/article/baby-indi-italy-life-support-76b9fdc69b1580ddf3bd971adc23027b
Now part of this is just fear of being caught with their pants down ("You think you can get better care in ITALY?"), but part of it is something very scary indeed.
More. Peter Singer, the utilitarian monster at Princeton, is now saying there's nothing wrong with zoophilia. This is after pronouncing that human life is not inherently more valuable than any other kind of life. Now, you have to give the guy credit, because this is where John Stuart Mill will inevitably lead.
We all of us benefit from antibiotics, and air conditioning and automatic dishwashers. But our ancestors had something we've lost, and certainly everybody in these boxes knows what it is.
Oh, I forgot. The national conservatives who are willing to trade off I don't know what for something like single-payer had better read this story very carefully. Because this is what you're going to get.
Great comment. One of the big problems with "Progress" is not that it doesn't recognize the trade-offs, but that it assumes that the net change will always show up in the plus column. This figures into why liberals and progressives, and even some progress-minded conservatives, always give nostalgia a negative connotation, when in fact all it really is is homesickness applied to time instead of place. Can homesickness be bad? Of course, if it's so strong as to be depressing or debilitating. But who thinks that homesickness is bad per se? I'd say the same thing applies to nostalgia.
There have been many cases like this. The parents of this 5 year old took him abroad for cancer treatment and the NHS called Interpol who chased the family across Europe. The parents were then jailed.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/ashya-kings-parents-jailed-seeking-alternative-cancer-treatment/story?id=29845761
Quite frankly the NHS is an outrage.
Remember the words at the opening of Conquest's Great Terror: the fear of the State.
Then there was this recent case where the NHS took a family to court because they wanted to seek treatment for their daughter in the US.
The NHS argued the girl was not of sound mind (psychologists said she was) and said it was in her best interests to die.
The courts put a gagging order on the family.
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/22/teenager-died-legal-fight-nhs-trust-named-sudiksha-thirumalesh
From a dialectical standpoint, we could also say that a world breaks apart because of its own internal tensions, or when the existing set of tradeoffs becomes untenable. Medieval Christendom produced unity but also a corrupt and political Church, which in turn called forth its own nemesis of the Reformation and subsequent secularism, and so on. it's not that there has ever been a perfect status quo that was merely ruined by something "outside" of itself. We could even say that the Fall of Eve and Adam came about because of the anxiety latent within untested freedom, which was bound to become manifest as sin at some point. In short, the seeds of the present's destruction are always already buried within itself, and it's only a matter of time before they sprout into a different future—and onward turns the karmic wheel, until the end.
It's a good point. Each era's trade-off is temporary, and the inherent tensions eventually pull it apart, leading to a new temporary balance of trade-offs being found for a different era. It's not pleasant when one finds oneself on the side that dislikes the "new" as compared to the old, even when recognizing the benefits and "costs" of both the old and the new systems taken as a whole, but it is an unfortunate reality of life.
Brendan, I agree – I would add, though, that some things don’t need to be trade-offs. I’m grateful for better medical care, but it doesn’t mean we needed to stop visiting our neighbours. We can bring back many of the things we value about the past and retain many of the things we value about the present.
Brian Kaller has an easy writing style, great insights, and should be published.
I am a son of suburbia, one of the most ephemeral lifestyles there is. My parents moved us to Seabrook MD in 1969. Seabrook was 99 % white in those days. Before World War Two, most of Prince George's County was made up of tobacco farms. This part of Maryland had been steeped in a tobacco culture since the 1600s. Nearly three centuries. After the war, the land was butchered up and made into housing developments full of Split-Foyers, Split-Levels, Colonials, Ramblers and Ranchers. Suburbanization was a radical change but when you are a child you don't realize how radical a change had occurred in Seabrook and the surrounding county. Most of the farmers sold out except for a Strawberry farm that catered to suburbanites. I worked at that farm during my senior year in high school. It has since been cut up into housing developments.
Seabrook was a fun place to grow up. It seemed every house in Seabrook had married parents and three children. Children would play tag at night in the summer. The Boys' Club provided sports and many men of the town volunteered to coach. Near the middle of town there was the Green Acres swimming pool that was filled with children in the summer and the blonde-haired children's hair would turn green due to the chlorine. The shopping center had a Grand Union grocery, a Bambino's pizza shop, a wonderful bakery, a record shop, a bank, a barber shop and a Tastee-Freeze, a favorite of mine. The Lanham Inn made a fine pizza. At the southern edge of town was Langway's bar, named for a hockey star. At the west edge of town was the rednecky Princess Garden Inn bar. Seabrook had four elementary schools, two junior highs and one senior high, DuVal.
But demographic change came to Seabrook slowly at first and then rapidly. Worse, almost all the institutions died. The Grand Union died first in the 80s and while the Grand Union franchise still lives, it is small and regional. The Tastee Freeze, Lanham Inn and the Princess Garden Inn died in the 90s. Langway's moved to Crofton and still exists. All the other stores died except the barber shop, still run by an Italian immigrant who is in his eighties. The schools were whittled down due to population decline. DuVal High still exists but is likely to get its name changed. DuVal is named after an obscure Supreme Court Justice appointed by James Madison, Gabriel Duvall. DuVal is in the process of being re-named as Duvall was a large landowner in the old tobacco days with a plantation full of slaves. So he was evil just like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and Lee.
The Seabrook I grew up in is dead as a roadkill deer. That's how suburbia works.
Marvellous writing. I will buy the book when it comes out.
A small point: "...that’s probably not how Homer’s audience saw it. Their descendants, by the time of Euripides or Sophocles, would think differently." The Greeks in the time of Euripides and Sophocles would not have thought so much differently from their Homeric forebears, at least on the matter of who we should sympathise with. It was the coming of Christianity that changed that, and that makes the big difference between us on the one hand, and the Sophoclean / Homeric Greeks on the other.
Re: The Greeks in the time of Euripides and Sophocles would not have thought so much differently from their Homeric forebears, at least on the matter of who we should sympathise with.
Sophocles and Euripides both wrote plays that it's hard to imagine would have been well received in earlier times. The Trojan Women portrays Homer's Greek heroes as brutes. Antigone celebrates individual conscience over obedience to authority. A definite sea change came over Greek culture in that era-- in fact something similar affected most of the civilizations of the mid-first millennium BC, giving us the Hebrew prophets, Zoroaster, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism and Taoism.
Nic T and JonF311, I agree more with Jon here, but perhaps Euripides and Sophocles were the start of a trend that reached its full fruition in Christianity.
I don’t think I can help, but this writer is so sane. I long for a Ben Op community, which is what I think he is describing. I want to get this book when it’s published.
“In a few generations we have become the most dependent creatures ever to exist outside of zoos.”
And that is perhaps the best description of how the Elites and Oligarchs view us, as a working zoo which is the inefficient engine for their Great Reset and NWO.
I'm going to push back a bit on the notion we're exceptionally dependent today-- because we've long been so. We humans are social animals. We need a finely woven social net around us, and did even way back in the Paleolithic. A lone human permanently cut off from others would not have lasted long when glaciers still towered over Europe and North America. And for some millennia now we've needed assorted domesticated creatures, and of course we're dependent on complexities of the Earth, and on the Sun.
JonF311, humans naturally live in families and tribes, but there is a world of difference between working alongside your kin to bring in the harvest versus depending on a global network of machines for your day-to-day needs.
OK, but nowadays we have the latter situation-- and the only way to return to the past set of circumstances involves mass death on a scale that would render trivial every other dying and killing event in our history summed together.
There was much indeed that was beautiful about old Ireland, and my husband's family celebrates it. But there's also the deep mourning that runs throughout Ireland because of the Great Famine (potato blight) from 1840-1852. One million died, another million (at least) fled the country, desperately searching for food, and a future somewhere else. They lost one-fourth of their entire population in those terrible years, and it spurred a century long population decline. Between 1840 and 1940, the population of Ireland dropped from 8.5 million to 4.5 million. When life was good in the agricultural world, it was very good; but when it went bad, it was deadly.
I am in no way minimizing or overlooking the horrific reality of the Great Famine, but it is not unimaginable to project that, given our current reliance on 'made' and 'provided' food (with the emphasis in both on the silent 'not by us'), our modern wayward world could enact this famine in far less time just by losing access to long-haul shipping capacity. The evidence of our absolute reliance on being provided with food - and of our (general) utter ignorance of how to reliably provide our own - was on full display during some brief moments of Covidtime. And it was sobering.
Wendell Berry has long said that our utter dependence on the petro-chemical industry for our food production and distribution should be considered a national security concern.
The problem is that there isn't enough arable land in the world to feed 7.9 billion people using "old-fashioned" farming. It wasn't until the industrial revolution brought about mechanized farming, imported fertilizers, and then began producing petro-chemical fertilizers that the earth's population began growing exponentially. The world's population was about 1 billion in the 1820s; in 1961 it reached 3 billion, and today, we're at 7.9 billion. Without that petro-chemical industry, there will be a massive die off, and it won't all happen where we won't see it or experience it. That or soylent green.
I hesitate to say it to you, of all people, but isn't this a post hoc argument?
It could be. Then again, I can't think of any other explanation for the massive population boom beginning in the 19th century. It's not like everyone was on birth control before. Agricultural yield improved dramatically.
Populations began to grow in the 1700s, and that may be due to the integration of American crops into old World agriculture, notably in China. In the late 19th century the sanitary revolution, beginning with simple low tech measures like making sure human waste did not pollute water sources, sent childhood mortality rates plummeting. Widespread, sometimes mandatory, smallpox vaccination played a roll too. But we did need more food to feed all the extra people who survived childhood. Some of that came from the opening of the American, Canadian, Argentine and Australian prairie's to intensive agriculture.
The point is not about the petro-chemical industry per se, but about the fact that we have grown completely dependent on it. If something were to happen to it, or to our grids that run it, we'd be doomed. We should never have allowed ourselves to get to that point to begin with, Green Revolution or not. Done correctly, small scale farming can be just as productive and efficient as industrial farming, and it should have been given the opportunity to demonstrate that alongside Big Agra, but the "get big or get out" mentality precluded it. As usual, "bigger-stronger-faster" prevailed without much thought for the downstream ramifications.
We just need our supply of diesel cut off and we wouldn't last longer than a few weeks.
Yes, I said this exactly to myself after posting my original comment!!
But it was the same then, too. As Derek says below, throughout the agricultural millennia, most people were one bad crop away from hunger, one bad year away from starvation. There were no backups. The medieval chroniclers logged famine years, and they were horrendous. The Great Famine started with bad weather in spring 1315. Crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer harvest in 1317, and Europe did not fully recover until 1322. Crop failures were not the only problem; cattle disease caused sheep and cattle numbers to fall as much as 80%. People, if not starving to death, were literally living on grass, bark, and whatever roots they could find.
We are still that way, we just like to pretend we're not.
All true! But imagine: would a woke college kid know how to ID an edible root or mushroom if that was the only possibility to eat for some span of time? In so many ways we are so much more ignorant of nature's options (inadequate though they may ultimately be in a situation of crop-ruining weather and extended crop failure).
Doesn't matter. There aren't enough edible roots and mushrooms and bark to go around for any population. See my comment above in reply to Rob G.
In old Russia scurvy was rampant among the upper classes during the long winter. Peter the Great's older brother Feodor III died of it. But Russian peasants were much less afflicted-- they knew various oldball wild foods, like bark bread and cedar sprigs, which were rich in Vitamin C (of course they didn't understand that detail) , things the boyars would never touch.
The Roman Empire came into being in large part because the Romans needed secure sources of grain to feed themselves-- and secure seaways to ship it. In the later Middle Ages a long distance grain trade developed with grain grown in Poland and Ukraine and this played a role in the rise of capitalism during the era. By the later 18th century government were going to great lengths (and into debt) to ensure there was enough bread when local sources had a bad year.
As many of you normals know, ADD drugs have been unavailable at worst, possibly available, at best, for at least a year. The uncertain ability to get medications one needs to live a life above the vegetating level is bad enough, but what nags at me is that a society which works has a dependability built into it. Things function reliably, and when they don't, they get fixed, quickly.
What we are going through with ADD drugs reminds me uncomfortably of memories I have of reading about shortfalls in production, and therefore shortages of things for sale on a shelf, in the dying Soviet Union. That's bad enough, but what is unnerving and extremely soviet is that no one seems to have an explanation for it. People have hypotheses, but truly, no one seems to know. It would be a strange but undeniable comfort to have it all explained by villainy or thus far successfully hidden f*ckuppery. I haven't checked on this in a week, so maybe a reason has been unearthed. Meanwhile, you can think of me as a canary in a coal mine, sick, but still with a song in my heart.
My paternal great grandfather fought in The War of Failed Southern Rebellion ( wrong side, natch ). I know almost nothing about him but his name, and that he had two children, my grandfather, Claudius, and my great aunt, Viola. His youth was interrupted when the Union Army grabbed his farm in northern Virginny, but his name choices for his two children does tend to vindicate the notion that our forebears had far more developed literacy than most of us have.
Seems like the issues haven’t really been solved save one...
Which one? I'm opaque, so it may be obvious and I don't see it. I talked to a pharmacist about the psychostimulant I do best with, and he told me that for reasons I probably didn't get clearly, it goes back to the pandemic. If I understood him correctly, the companies which make these drugs got sloppy with their paperwork, and the FDA is making them do the protracted, pointless crawl which the FDA usually does.
Here's a great story, about which I know no more than the following: circa 1970, because of the national hysteria about drug use in young people, the FDA took Ritalin off the market for awhile. There was a neurologist in upstate New York, a man ahead of his time by thirty years, who had been using it with tremendous success to treat traumatic brain injury patients clinically. He was enraged by the FDA's move, and unwilling to let his TBI patients rot. He started making trips to Europe, where it was still available, smuggling it back into America, and selling it at cost to his patients. He was risking not only his medical license, of course, but many years in federal prison. He had great moral courage, and never got caught.
A hero for the ages, if you ask me.
Hi I may have been answering the wrong post.
That is a risk around here. It's happened to others. You would think Substack could fix it.
Not too long ago most people were one bad crop away from hunger. The Irish diaspora altered many different parts of the world. Massachusetts. New York. Chicago. Australia. Glasgow. Liverpool doubled in population in just a couple of years. I believe three of the four Beatles are primarily Irish by blood.
Yes, not Ringo. I don't know about George. but Lennon and McCartney certainly were. It explains the corn.
Ah, so they're basically like Celtic bards—that makes sense.
The Welsh and Irish are better singers than the English.
Even Richie Starkey had some Irish blood but not much. He grew up the poorest of the four.
Not discounting the effects of the potato blight but wasn't much of the resulting famine due to hoarding and distribution, i.e., the English overseers keeping the remaining crops for export?
Yes. The history is pretty horrific.
Correct. It was a man-made famine. There was plenty of food to feed the Irish. The English leadership ignored their pleas for help because the Irish were considered deplorable. Sound familiar?
There were a lot of absentee English landlords who cared more for money than for people, especially Irish people.
Yes, in the book, Brian says that the starvation of the Irish peasantry by the British was the worst act of its kind in Europe until the Holocaust.
Many landlords didn't want to pay the poor law tax so they shipped the Irish to Canada and America in the infamous "coffin ships." Even in modern times, listening to a CD of live performances of The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, the bitterness of the Irish remains in the crosstalk of the musicians. Not that Ireland doesn't mind English tourists these days.
The Corn Laws too.
Kaller's work is very good stuff. I hope he finds a publisher.
I read a lot of this sort of writing, both US and UK, and one such book I would highly recommend is Charles Fish's "In Good Hands." On the UK side the natural place to start would be Ronald Blythe's classic "Akenfield." Neither book is sentimental about the past, but they don't crow about how much better things are today either. In short, they recognize the trade-offs for what they are. And of course you find these same sorts of observations in all of Wendell Berry's work.
Rob G, thank you! I have not read either book, but will put them on my list.
You're welcome, Brian. Best wishes on finding a publisher and on future writing efforts!
The book is beautifully written and sadly describes an Ireland that will never exist again, if, in fact, as a country, it ever did. Ireland is now the "woke" capital of Europe as well described in this article from The European Conservative. Hard to believe what has happened to this country.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/welcome-to-ireland-the-woke-capital-of-europe/
It also includes a statement which I'm sure accurately describes the sincere belief of the author (and probably the majority of those who subscribes to Rod's substack) as a good Christian but which I believe represents his and your weakness in truly fighting the woke ideology that has taken over the West. "We can and should treat people as equals, if we mean under the law or in the eyes of God as fellow human souls making their way through earth," It sounds wonderful in theory and is suicidal in secular practice.
If by "treating people as equals", he means the "golden rule," of course we should. Christ himself gave that instruction. But we also have a duty to the truth, God's truth above all. Sin, delusion, lies, none of that should be honored, not even to preserve someone's feelings.
https://www.regnery.com/9781621578017/nostalgia/
Well worth reading, as Esolen always is.