I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.
Wendell Berry.
Given the above, isn't Agrarianism simply agricultural distributism?
But Agrarianism goes much further than this. It retains something that the rest of society has tragically lost, which is that we are inseparably bound to the soil, and inseparably bound to nature.
The fact that we have lost this has been massively corrupting and is massively destructive. Indeed, it threatens to destroy us.
Not everyone in a modern agrarian economy would be farmers, as some like to either imagine, or criticize. But society would be family farm oriented. And it would value the land ethic.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.
The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac. Aldo Leopold.
Realizing that agrarianism is, whether we like it or not, and that we ignore it at our ultimate peril and destruction, is the paramount task of agrarians today. No one thing every cures all of a society's ills, but a modern agrarian economy would come pretty darned close.
Which presumes not only a well grounded society, but a well-educated society.
When this blog was started several years ago, the purpose of it was to explore historical topics, often the routine day to day type stuff, from the period of roughly a century ago. It started off as a means of researching things, for a guy too busy to really research, for a historical novel.
It didn't start off as a general commentary on the world type of deal, nor did it start off as a "self help" type of blog either. Over time, however, the switch to this blog for commentary, away from the blog that generally hosts photographs, has caused a huge expansion here of commentary of all types, including in this category and, frankly, in every other.
Readers of this blog (of which there are extraordinarily few) know that I've made a series of comments in the "career" category recently that touch on lawyers and mental health. They also know that I was working on a case (actually, two cases) in which an opposing lawyer, without warning or indication, killed himself. That's bothered me a great deal thereafter. It isn't as if we could have done anything, but that it occurred bothers me. And, as noted in the synchronicity threads, I've been reading a lot of comments in lawyer related journals and blogs on this topic as well. Perhaps they were always there and I hadn't bothered taking note of them, or perhaps that's synchronicity again.
In that category, I stumbled upon a piece written by a fellow who runs a very well liked blog, and who is a lawyer, but whom has never practiced. I very rarely check that blog, The Art of Manliness, but it's entertaining to read (or probably aggravating to read for some) and I was spending some early morning time in a hotel room waiting for a deposition to start and stopped in there for the first time in eons. Sure enough, there's an article by a lawyer on the topic of mental health. Specifically, there was an article on depression, which is the same thing that a lot of these lawyer journals are writing on. Having somewhat read some of the others, and being surprised to find this one, I read it. Turns out there's an entire series of them and I didn't read them all, but in the one I did read, I was struck by this quote:
If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.
I think there's a whole lot to that.
The "office" your DNA views as suitable. . . and suitable alone.
Indeed, I think a drove of current social and psychological ills, not just depression by any means, stem from the fact that we've built a massively artificial world that most of us don't really like living in. It's a true paradox, as I think that same effort lies at a simple root, the human desire to be free from true want. I.e., starvation. Fear of starvation lead us to farming to hedge against it, and that lead to civilization. Paradoxically, the more we strive for "an easy life", the further we take ourselves away from our origins, which is really where we still dwell, deep in our minds.
Okay, at this point I'm trailing into true esoteric philosophy and into psychology, but I think I may be more qualified than many to do just that. Indeed, I was an adherent of the field of evolutionary biology long before that field came to be called that, and my background may explain why. So just a tad on that.
Some background
With my father, at the fish hatchery, as a little boy.
When I was growing up, I was basically outdoors all the time, and I came from a very "outdoorsy" group of people. And in the Western sense. People who hunted and fished, garden and who were close to agriculture by heritage. They were also all well educated. There was no real separation in any one aspect of our lives. Life, play, church, were all one thing, much as I wrote about conceptually the other day.
When I went to go to college, post high school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do and decided on being a game warden, which reflects my views at the time, and shows my mindset in some ways now, set on rural topics as it is. However, my father worried about that and gently suggested that career openings in that field were pretty limited. He rarely gave any advice of that type, so I heeded his suggestion (showing I guess how much I respected his advice), and majored in geology, and outdoor field.
As a geology student, we studied the natural world, but the whole natural world back into vast antiquity. Part of that was studying the fossil record and the adaptive nature of species over vast time. It was fascinating. But having a polymath personality, I also took a lot of classes in everything else, and when I completed my degree at the University of Wyoming, I was only a few credits away from a degree in history as well.
Trilobites on display in a store window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now extinct, trilobites occurred in a large number of species and, a this fossil bed demonstrates, there were a lot of them.
That start on an accidental history degree lead me ultimately to a law degree, as it was one of my Casper College professors, Jon Brady, who first suggested it to me. I later learned that another lawyer colleague of mine ended up a lawyer via a suggestion from the same professor. Brady was a lawyer, but he was teaching as a history professor. I know he'd practiced as a Navy JAG officer, but I don't know if he otherwise did. If lawyer/history professor seems odd, one of the principal history professors at the University of Wyoming today is a lawyer as well, and the archivist at Casper College is a lawyer. I totally disagree with the law school suggestion that "you can do a lot with a law degree" other than practice law, but these gentlemen's careers would suggest otherwise.
Anyhow, at the time the suggestion was made I had little actual thought of entering law school and actually was somewhat bewildered by the suggestion. I was a geology student and I was having the time of my life. I was always done with school by late afternoon, and had plenty of time to hunt during the hunting season nearly every day, which is exactly what I did. By 1983, however, the bloom was coming off the petroleum industry's rose and it was becoming increasingly obvious that finding employment was going to be difficult. Given that, the suggestion of a career in the law began to be something I took somewhat more seriously. By the time I graduated from UW in 1986, a full blown oilfield depression was going on and the law appeared to be a more promising option than going on to an advance degree in geology. I did ponder trying to switch to wildlife management at that point, but it appeared to be a bad bet at that stage.
Casper College Geomorphology Class, 1983. Odd to think of, but in those days, in the summer, I wore t-shirts. I hardly ever do that now when out in the sticks. This photos was taken in the badlands of South Dakota.
So what does that have to do with anything?
Well, like more than one lawyer I actually know, what that means is that I started out with an outdoor career with outdoor interests combined with an academic study of the same, and then switched to a career which, at least according to Jon Brady, favored "analytical thinking" (which he thought I had, and which is the reason he mentioned the possibility to me). And then there's the interest in nature and history to add to it.
Our artificial environment
So, as part of all of that, I've watched people and animals in the natural and the unnatural environment. And I don't really think that most people do the unnatural environment all that well. In other words, I know why the caged tiger paces.
People who live with and around nature are flat out different than those who do not. There's no real getting around it. People who live outdoors and around nature, and by that I mean real nature, not the kind of nature that some guy who gets out once a year with a full supply of the latest products from REI thinks he experiences, are different. They are happier and healthier. Generally they seem to have a much more balanced approach to big topics, including the Divine, life and death. They don't spend a lot of time with the latest pseudo philosophical quackery. You won't find vegans out there. You also won't find men who are as thin as pipe rails sporting haircuts that suggest they want to be little girls. Nor will you find, for that matter, real thugs.
You won't find a lot of people who are down, either.
Indeed the blog author noted above noted that, and quotes from Jack London, the famous author, to the effect and then goes on to conclude:
If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.
I think he's correct there. And to take it one step further, I think the degree to which people retain a desire to be closer to nature reflects itself back in so many ways we can barely appreciate it.
Truth be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief time. All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time, people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.
Ruin at Bandalier National Monument. The culture that built these dwellings still lives nearby, in one of the various pueblos of New Mexico. These people were living in stone buildings and growing corn, but they were pretty clearly close to nature, unlike the many urbanites today who live in brick buildings in a society that depends on corn, but where few actually grow it. The modern pueblos continue to live in their own communities, sometimes baffling European Americans. I've heard it declared more than once that "some have university educations but they still go back to the reservation."
Even in our own culture, those who lived rural lives were very much part of the life of the greater nation as a whole, than they are now. Now most people probably don't know a farmer or a rancher, and have no real idea of what rural life consists of. Only a few decades back this was not the case. Indeed, if a person reads obituaries, which are of course miniature biographies of a person, you'll find that for people in their 80s or so, many, many, had rural origins, and it's common to read something like "Bob was born on his families' farm in Haystack County and graduated from Haystack High School in 1945. He went to college and after graduating from high school worked on the farm for a time before . . . ."
Louisiana farmer, 1940s. Part of the community, not apart from it.
Now, however this is rarely the case. Indeed, we can only imagine how unimaginably dull future obits will be, for the generation entering the work force now. "Bob's parents met at their employer Giant Dull Corp where they worked in the cubicle farm. Bob graduated from Public School No 117 and went to college majoring in Obsolete Computers, where upon he obtained a job at Even Bigger Dull Corp. . . "
No wonder things seem to be somewhat messed up with many people.
Indeed, people instinctively know that, and they often try to compensate for it one way or another. Some, no matter how urban they are, resist the trend and continue to participate in the things people are evolved to do. They'll hunt, they fish, and they garden. They get out on the trails and in the woods and they participate in nature in spite of it all.
Others try to create little imaginary natures in their urban walls. I can't recount how many steel and glass buildings I've been in that have framed paintings or photographs of highly rural scenes. Many offices seem to be screaming out for the 19th Century farm scape in their office decor. It's bizarre. A building may be located on 16th Street in Denver, but inside, it's 1845 in New Hampshire. That says a lot about what people actually value.
Others, however, sink into illness, including depression. Unable to really fully adjust to an environment that equates with the zoo for the tiger, they become despondent. Indeed, they're sort of like the gorilla at the zoo, that spends all day pushing a car tire while looking bored and upset. No wonder. People just aren't meant to live that way.
Others yet will do what people have always done when confronted with a personal inability to live according to the dictates of nature, they rebel against it. From time immemorial people have done this, and created philosophies and ideas that hate the idea of people itself and try to create a new world from their despair. Vegans, radical vegetarians, animal rights, etc., or any other variety of Neo Pagans fit this mold. Men who starve themselves and adopt girly haircuts and and wear tight tight jeans so as to look as feminine as possible, and thereby react against their own impulses. The list goes on and on. And it will get worse as we continue to hurl towards more and more of this.
But we really need not do so. So why are we?
"It's inevitable". No it isn't. Nothing is, except our own ends. We are going this way as it suits some, and the ones it principally suits are those who hold the highest economic cards in this system, and don't therefore live in the cubicle farm themselves. We don't have to do anything of this sort, we just are, as we believe that we have to, or that we haven't thought it out.
So, what can we do
First of all, we ought to acknowledge our natures and quit attempting to suppress them . Suppressing them just makes us miserable and or somewhat odd. To heck with that.
The ills of careerism.
Careerism, the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the concept of "career" became incredibly dominant. In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as women were sold on careerism.
How people view their work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone views their work as they view it. And not all demographics in a society view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide view that predominates.
In our society, and for a very long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that the key to self worth is a career. Students, starting at the junior high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which leads to "a high paying career". For decades the classic careers were "doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case it's really retuning to its American historical norm.
Anyhow, this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view that economics and careers matter more than anything else. More than family, more than location, more than anything. People leave their homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their immediate families.
The payoff for that is money, but that's it. Nothing else.
The downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the people they were once closest too.
What's that have to do with this topic?
Well, quite a lot.
People who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good. Having no close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often times was agricultural or wild land just recently. And not being in anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.
That's not all of course. Vagabonds without attachment, they severe themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual sense of place. We were meant to be part of a community, and those who have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into that community even against their expressed desires. In a stable society, money matters, but so does community and relationship. For those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.
There's something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to observe. There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a "retirement community" that's also new to them. At that stage, they often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in, but what sort of community is that? One probably made up of people their own age and much like themselves. Not really a good situation.
Now, am I saying don't have a career? No, I'm not. But I am saying that the argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really, whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on nature and a place in the tribe. Deep down, that's really still who you are. If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the more power to you. But if you view your place in the world as a series of ladders in place and income, it's sad.
As long as we have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every imaginable way. This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy. This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same thing.
Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live around here. Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection, but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities. He noted that; "this is our home". That says a lot.
Get out there.
Public (Federal) fishing landing in Natrona County, Wyoming. When we hear of our local politicians wanting to "take back" the Federal lands, those of us who get out imagine things like this decreasing considerably in number. We shouldn't let that happen, and beyond that, we should avail ourselves of these sites.
And our nature is to get out there in the dirt.
Go hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding. Whatever you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get out.
That means, fwiw, that we also have to quit taking snark shots at others in the dirt, if we do it. That's part of human nature as well, and humans are very bad about it. I've seen flyfishermen be snots to bait fisherman (you guys are all just fisherman, angler dudes and dudessses, and knock off the goofy crap about catching and releasing everything.. . you catch fish as we like to catch fish because nature endowed us with the concept that fish are tasty).Some fisherman will take shots at hunters; "I don't hunt, . . . but I fish (i.e., fishing hunting. Some "non consumptive (i.e., consumptive in another manner) outdoors types take shots at hunters and fisherman; "I don't hunt, but I ride a mountain bike (that's made of mined stuffed and shipped in a means that killed wildlife just the same)".
If you haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better. If you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like to do that has to do with their elemental natures. Try an armed hike with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or not. Give it a try. And so on.
Get elemental
At the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try hunting. Try fishing. Raise a garden.
Unless economics dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your dirt.
Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely worthless crop of grass. Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop. I'm not saying your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow something. And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you probably should.
The Land Ethic
Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie. The Muries lived in Wyoming and have a very close connection with Teton County, although probably the majority of Wyomingites do not realize that. This photo was taken at a meeting of The Wilderness Society in 1946. While probably not widely known now, this era saw the beginnings of a lot of conservation organizations. At this point in time, Leopold was a professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Decades ago writer Aldo Leopold wrote in his classic A Sand Country Almanac about the land ethic. Leopold is seemingly remembered today by some as sort of a Proto Granola, but he wasn't. He was a hunter and a wildlife agent who was struck by what he saw and wrote accordingly. Beyond that, he lived what he wrote.
A person can Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original writings on the topic. I"m not going to try to post them there, as the book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time prior to that. Because of the content of the book, and everything that has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came after Leopold's untimely death at age 61. It'd be easy to boil Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't be taking it too far.
If I've summarized it correctly, and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling, really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust Bowl. In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past. Now, that's very much not the case. I suspect, further, in Leopold's day depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't nearly as big of problem. Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.
Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, however. Not that the wildness of land is not appreciated. Indeed, it is likely appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not doing a terrible good job at. The more urbanized we make our world, the less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city parks don't change that. Some thought about what we're doing is likely in order. As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more important than the short term.
It's not inevitable.
The only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way is solely because most people will it to do so. And if that's bad for us, we shouldn't.
There's nothing inevitable about a Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't. Baloney. We don't exist for business, it exists for us.
Some thought beyond the acceptance of platitudes is necessary in the realm of economics, which is in some ways what we're discussing with this topic. Americans of our current age are so accepting of our current economic model that we excuse deficiencies in it as inevitable, and we tend to shout down any suggestion that anything be done, no matter how mild, as "socialism".
The irony of that is that our economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature. And a corporatist model requires governmental action to exist. The confusion that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism" would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of course would be absurd. Real socialism is when the government owns the means of production. Social Democracy, another thing that people sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what we're suggesting here either.
Rather, I guess what we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism. That's not what we're referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it discourages government participation through the weighting of the economy towards corporations.
It's not impossible
Now, I know that some will read this and think that it's all impossible for where they are, but truth be known it's more possible in some ways now than it has been for city dwellers, save for those with means, for many years. Certainly in the densely packed tenements of the early 19th Century getting out to look at anything at all was pretty darned difficult.
Most cities now at least incorporate some green space. A river walk, etc. And most have some opportunities for things that at least replicate real outdoor sports, and I mean the real outdoor activities, not things like sitting around in a big stadium watching a big team. That's not an outdoor activity but a different type of activity (that I'm not criticizing). We owe it to ourselves.
Now, clearly, some of what is suggested here is short term, and some long. And this is undoubtedly the most radical post I've ever posted here. It won't apply equally to everyone. The more means a person has, if they're a city dweller, the easier for it is for them to get out. And the more destructive they can be when doing so, as an irony of the active person with means is that the mere presence of their wealth in an activity starts to make it less possible for everyone else. But for most of us we can get out some at least, and should.
I'm not suggesting here that people should abandon their jobs in the cities and move into a commune. Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that as that doesn't square with what I"m actually addressing here at all. But I am suggesting that we ought to think about what we're going, and it doesn't appear we are. We just charge on as if everything must work out this way, which is choosing to let events choose for us, or perhaps letting the few choose for the many. Part of that may be rethinkiing the way we think about careers. We all know it, but at the end of the day having made yourself rich by way of that nomadic career won't add significantly, if at all, to your lifespan and you'll go on to your eternal reward the same as everyone else, and sooner or later will be part of the collective forgotten mass. Having been a "success" at business will not buy you a second life to enjoy.
None of this is to say that if you have chosen that high dollar career and love it, that you are wrong. Nor is this to say that you must become a Granola. But, given the degree to which we seem to have a modern society we don't quite fit, perhaps we ought to start trying to fit a bit more into who we are, if we have the get up and go to do it, and perhaps we ought to consider that a bit more in our overall societal plans, assuming that there even are any.
Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village. Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.
Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".
"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.
We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures. This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings.
I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.
For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.1
The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world. That just isn't the case in this instance.
A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing. Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true. That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.
In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing. Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization. And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.
We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again. Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time. Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.
This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.
Food is a good example.
Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat. In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations. Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad. People took measures they normally wouldn't.
Not everyone did, however.
At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't. People would starve instead.
Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight. Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things. Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.
As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:
Sergeant Chillum: Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.
Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?
Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.
This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one. Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight. No culture in a state of nature does.
When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people. When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.
So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.
Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.
Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand. While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families. Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well. Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.
In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio. Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time. A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days. Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.
Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours. Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game. There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.
Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:
Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.
Emperor Haile Selassie
Married men, take your wives. Not married? Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.
It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true. Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable. War provides a pretty good example again.
Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known. If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder. Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.
Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war. This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.
Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt. That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go. Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.
Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time. The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers. However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.
So too are much of our current living patters.
Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.
And that's deeply unnatural.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours. And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses. In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.
It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:
Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches. But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life. AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours. They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.
Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like. Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor. Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.
By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s. Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars. Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed. Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period. The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.
Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice. Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating. When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did. Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.
Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.
Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses. This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it. That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured. While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak. Secretaries and assistants. Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses. One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.
There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature. Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife". I've even heard a person refer to herself that way. Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.
Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.
In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none. As we earlier posted:
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies". They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.
A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team. Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."
The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation. Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification. You'll have to read between the lines on that one.
Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur. It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.
In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.
But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?
We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear. We should be looking at how it comes about.
Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.
Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this. Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks. It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.
Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .
The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated. It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual. It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual. Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.
Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies. It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy. A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will. As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution. Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.
It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class. In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy. In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.
English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason. Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease". Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender. Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school. Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to. Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.
It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.
In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally. But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis. People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.
Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution. We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one. While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost. The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating. Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.
None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.
But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about. And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.
All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.
And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.
But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything. This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.
The evidence supports the contrary.
Which gets us back to our original point. African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have. But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.
And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle. Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about. We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.
Footnotes:
1. Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed. My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.
When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has. Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change. The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage. In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.
On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.
His points were really good.
Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern. It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016. Well, guess what, she has a right to do that. You have a right to ignore it.
She also expressed support for abortion being legal. I feel it should be illegal. That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.
But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out. He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.
Indeed, they are.
Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club. Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex. Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.
Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed. Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.
And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.
Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private. It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues. And we really don't need to. But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper. As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.
It's not that there's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about. They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do. No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.
Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.
The Andy Griffith Show
I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun. It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.
It's interesting.
The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much. It ran from 1960 to 1968. It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964. Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.
But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here. The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago. That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.
Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means. But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers. To some degree, that world view had returned.
Epilog
The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.
Note: This post was started a little while ago, so it predates the recent drama in the House of Representatives. I'm noting that as I don't want to give the impression that this post was inspired by it or the choosing of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.
We've dealt with a bunch of interesting odds and ends in recent months, some of which have popped back up in surprising places.
There is, for instance, a series of threads on the Synod on Synodality and what it is, or is not, about and what it will, or will not take up. The Synod itself was immediately preceded by five cardinals publishing a Dubia, receiving a reply they deemed insufficient, and then following that up with another Dubia to which they did not receive a response. That in turn lead to the first reply being published, which was immediately badly analyzed, including bad analysis in both conservative and liberal Catholic news organs.
What caused all the furor was that Pope Francis, who has a real knack for ambiguity, is the Pope's reply to this question:
Just after that, I listened to a First Things interview of Mary Eberstadt. The interview had actually been in 2019, but I'm that far behind on that podcast, which I'm not universally endorsing. This interview was very interesting, however, as Eberstadt had just published Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The prolific author has published several more books since then, but this one touched on topics that I wouldn't have thought it did. Eberstadt is a real intellectual heavyweight and has to be taken seriously.
Eberstadt, speaking from those seemingly long ago pre-COVID-19 days, already was discussing some major issues that were already there, but now are much more there, seemingly having erupted to some degree after Western Society spent months in their hovels contemplating their reproductive organs. Most interesting, she took examples from the natural world, which caused the episode to be titled There Are No Lone Wolves. Indeed, there are no lone wolves in nature, that concept being a complete myth, but what Eberstadt did is to apply what I have also applied here, to the same topic I've applied it to. That subject being evolutionary biology.
Eberstand pointed out the degree to which behavior in the natural world, of which we are part, is actually learned. Wolf puts that grow up in an unnatural environment never learn how to be functioning wild wolves. Rhesus macaque's, which were subject to an experiment to derive the information, don't learn how to act in the typical manner of their species if raised in isolation, and in fact slip into psychotic behavior.
Eberstadt's point, which she's double downed on since then, is that father's children growing to be freakin' messes as they don't learn how to do anything. She had the data, moreover, to prove it. Some may feel that she's drawing too much from it, but statistically, she's not only firing with both barrels, but she's loaded up a 10 gauge with Double O. Anyone feeling that she's at least not 60% correct is fooling themselves.
Eberstadt, and she's not the first to do so, ties all of this to the Sexual Revolution.
What Eberstadt is noting is not only something we've noted here before, but what touches upon our fourth law of human behavior, which provides:
Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth. He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you." You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger. He wants out. He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.
It's really no different with human beings. We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time. Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage. Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Yeoman's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers. Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.
That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well. I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case. A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly. Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.
This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women. Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a mammal. Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats. But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees. Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.
That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood. If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one. Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it. So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there. That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that. It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.
The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them. Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts. But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.
This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen. Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden. But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become. We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world. In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies". They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.
A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team. Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."
The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation. Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification. You'll have to read between the lines on that one.
Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur. It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.
In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptance of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.
Eh", you may be thinking. I thought this thread was on something else. One of these is not like the other.
Oh, they very much are.
Laudate Deum is a cri de coeur for the environment, and it's not the first time Pope Francis has spoken on these topics. He's not the first Apostolic Bishop to speak on it, either. The head of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity has done so for many years, resulting in his being called The Green Patriarch. It's interesting, indeed, to note that Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met just the day prior to Laudate Deum being released.
Laudate Deum, it should be noted, stated something that naturally caused some in the US to go all apoplectic. Of interest, the document stated:
Comments like that, of course, are just the kind of thing that sends a certain Presbyterian Wyoming Senator who is a fallen away Catholic right to the microphone to blurt into Twitter about Joe Biden's "radical green agenda" when they come from Joe Biden. They are also the kind of things that causes locals to use the rationale, "I make money from the energy sector. . . and I'm a good person. . . so this must be a fib."
We might as well note that there is also a certain Protestant strain of thought, which has crept into everything in the US, which is a Protestant country even if it doesn't recognize it, that this can't be true as our relationship with nature if purely economic and exploitative. It's the same line of thought that gives us things like the health and wealth gospel. A major proponent of that view in government was the late James Watt, who was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan. Watt held the view that Christ was coming very soon, so we should just charge ahead and use everything up, which we were, in his view, Biblically mandated to do anyhow. That's not most people's view, and it certainly isn't an Apostolic Christian view. A fair number of Americans have some sort of view like that, however, basically believing that God has promised them a trouble free life irrespective of their own conduct, something that also allows big box type churches to fill up with people who've divorced multiple times but who still feel good about themselves.
Indeed, while I don't know for sure, what little I know about Speaker of the House Johnson causes me to suspect he holds this view. He's a conservative Evangelical Christian of the young earth variety. Contrary to what pundits seem to believe, not all Evangelicals are conservative, nor do they hold by any means a uniform set of beliefs, but young earth Evangelicals, and he's a sincere one, tend to have a set of beliefs that link very heavily with resource consumption and suspicion of science. He's also a climate change denier, which is further evidence that this is the case.
On politics itself, however, the current political crisis in the United States specifically and the West in general seems to reflect this. People are mad, and to a large extent they're mad at the political order. The political order, over the past 80 to 90 years, has served the interest of liberalism, industrialism, and urbanism, even though often ignorantly, and often with the left and right seemingly being unaware that they were doing it. At the present time, the sense that something is deeply wrong and has been lost fuels populist rage, even if populist leaders, like Johnson, continue to serve in some ways the very forces that causes this to come about. Liberals, on the other hand, are baffled that having given people societal sanction to do nothing other than contemplate their genitals all day long and self define as whatever they want, people are unhappy. It's interesting expressed in the babble of economists, right and left, both of whom are focused on the economy, both loving the corporate capitalist economic system, and seemingly being unable to grasp that people figure that their lives at home and in their communities matter more than getting "good jobs" at Big Cubicle.
So the connection in all of this?
What Pope Francis is noting, in a way, stems from our disconnect with nature. So is what Mary Eberstadt and your truly earlier, with your humble author being an earlier observer of this than Eberstadt. A critic, for that matter, of Francis's encyclical accidentally sort of sum's up the topic in another way, which I don't think Francis would actually disagree with:
Let us just imagine for a moment that we really do waste too many resources, that we suck on too many plastic straws, and that cow flatulence is really the greatest threat facing humanity since the Black Plague; even if that were all true, the cause of the problem would be sin and apostasy from God.
Kennedy Hall in Crisis.
We're having environmental problems, political problems, psychological problems, sexual identify problems and are basically a bunch of unhappy people as we've separated ourselves from nature, and indeed, as Hall would note, or suggest, we've done it in a sinful fashion, which involved lust, greed, avarice, gluttony and denial of reality.
Is there a world view that counters any of this?
The philosophy that's noted that for a long time is Agrarianism.
Agrarianism occurs in different forms in different localities, but Western Agrarianism, broadly defined, which occured in the United States and in some regions of Europe, is soil, nature, localism, distributist, and family oriented by nature. Indeed, some of these things can turn people off of it, if too narrowly focused. For instance, you can find Agrarian blogs, or at least one, that's Calvinist in nature, or another one that's basically of the Protestant nature described above. We're talking, however, more of the sort of agrarianism that was present in Quebec up until mid-Century, or in the American Southwest until the mid 20th Century, or in Finland prior to the 1950s, and as written about by Chesterton, and frankly by the Southern Agrarians with the weird racism removed.
People don't like the modern world. It's depersonalized us, seperated us from the people we love, forced us into work environments on a daily basis which are based only on money, seperated us from nature, and it may, again in the name of money, be setting to damage everything.
We really don't have to do this. Getting back from this, however, will not be easily. It would take a purpose driven societal effort.
The template for it is already there, in the agrarian works of the not too distant past. It would also require, quite frankly, some education of the masses which believe in the home and business economics of the industrial revolution as being part of the human structure, when in fact they are not. It would also require asking "why?" a lot, particularly of boosters for one thing or another who always proclaim things to be for the public good.
It sounds like a pipe dream, of course, but something is in the air. It just isn't synthesized.
If it were. . .
Footnotes.
1. These Bushmen bands are not Chrisitan, but their theology loosely is actualy remarkably close to it.
