Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming's Bishop Steven Biegler on Fiducia Supplicans.

Lex Anteinternet: Wyoming's Bishop Steven Biegler on Fiducia Supplic...:

Wyoming's Bishop Steven Biegler on Fiducia Supplicans.

Chances are, if you took a poll, most Catholics in the pews here on Sunday couldn't tell you who the Bishop for the Diocese of Cheyenne is.

And that is as it should be.

By and large, if things are going relatively well, there's no real reason for you to know who the Bishop is.  An observant Catholic no doubt knows who the parish priest(s) is/are, who the deacon is, if there is one, and probably knows who the priests are in the across town parishes.  And they may have kept track of a favorite priest once he was reassigned.  But the Bishop?  Well, for the most part, they don't really interact with him.

Now, having said that, there's always observant who do know who the Bishop is, and of course he's prayed for, along with the Pope, every Mass.  So, yes, I know who the Bishop is, and I've known who the Bishops were going back into my teenage years.

Having an opinion on how well a Bishop is doing is another matter.

The first time that I can recall a Bishop was from when I was a kid.  We were going fishing and as my father, in our 1965 Chevrolet pickup, entered The Narrows, a car was beside the road and a couple of men standing by it.  "That's the Bishop", my father stated, and we pulled off.  Their car had broken down.  The Bishop and a priest got in, and we took them back to town, which mean we had four adults and one child in the cab of a pickup.

At that time, that wasn't abnormal.

"How's the fishing?" is what I recalled him saying.

That would have been Bishop Newell, who stepped down in 1978, and who passed away in 1987.  He was a Coloradan.  He would have been nearly the same age as my father's father and mother.  He'd been the Bishop since 1951, although in later hears there was a co-Bishop (not the right word).  He was well liked.

He was the Bishop at my Confirmation, and actually picked my Confirmation Name, as in the mushy days of the 1970s, I'd somehow failed to pick one and nobody had required me to.  He picked "John".

The next Bishop was Bishop Hart.

We didn't react much to Bishop Hart, although I can recall that my father was not a fan of the Bishop's Appeal, which we still have.  He didn't approve of some of the things it was used for, and probably still wouldn't.

Bishop Hart was later accused of improper conduct with a few boys in his prior diocese and at least one here.  He was thoroughly investigated by the police and DA's office twice, and both times they chose not to prosecute, feeling the accusations unwarranted.  Under the current, and maybe prior, Bishop there was an ecclesiastical followup on this, with the same going all the way to the Vatican, with the Vatican also feeling there wasn't enough there to sanction him.  Nonetheless, the current Bishop has been of the view, basically, that he was guilty and taken that position officially.  He really focused on it for a long time.

That's been one of the reasons that I've been somewhat critical of the current Bishop.  

Americans claim to believe that you are innocent until proven guilty, but we don't.  We should at least pretend that we do officially, however, if the process is to mean anything.  And to have had two DA's and a Vatican process all say that there wasn't enough there should mean that we at least cease to have a focus on an accusation.

This is moreover all the more the case in a diocese in which the population is highly transient, and most Catholics here weren't here when Bishop Hart was the bishop.  Indeed, the current bishop has had a quiet focus on Hispanic immigrants, which also were, ironically, a focus of Bishop Hart, and most of the Hispanics in Wyoming, if they were even alive when he was Bishop, were probably living in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chihuahua.

And no, I'm not joking in that observation.

We've had a series of Bishops in recent years, and at least in my observation, there's some quiet discontent on this one in general, at least in some quarters.

Bishop David Ricken, who was originally from Dodge City, Kansas, was really popular, and a genuinely nice guy.  He was later made the Bishop of Green Bay. After him, we had Bishop Etienne, who was quite popular in no small part because he was a farmer and a hunter, and seemed like one of us. That may be why Pope Benedict picked him.  He later went on to be assigned to the Archdiocese of Anchorage, and is now in the Archdiocese of Seattle.

Bishop Biegler is from South Dakota and should be regarded as one of us, but it's been my observation that he's never been popular with a selection of Catholics here. The more conservative a Catholic is, the least likely he is to be a fan of Bishop Biegler.  That may simply be because he was appointed by Pope Francis, whom conservative Catholics here aren't huge fans of, which is true of a selection of conservative Catholics across the U.S.  As noted, he's really focused on the Priest Abuse scandals, and oddly enough that may be part of the reason he's not been hugely popular.  We're a minority religion here and Wyoming did not have a huge problem. There were some priests implicated, but it was quite limited in general.  Focusing on it tends to put Catholics in disdain by non-Catholics, a problem in a population where you are already regarded as odd for being Catholic.  Indeed, just the other day a Baptist minister made a joke at my expense for being a Catholic, apparently unaware that protestant denominations have had just as big, if not bigger, problem, but that it largely goes unnoticed as the press really doesn't follow Protestantism very much.

Teachers, as we've noted, have the largest rate of icky transgressions.

Anyhow, the whisperers tend to suggest that Bishop Biegler is one of Francis' bishops, by which they mean that they believe that Francis is a liberal who is pushing the Church into accommodation with homosexuality.  That likely misjudges Francis.  What it doesn't misjudge is that the US has had a selection of disappointing Bishops, while it also had a selection of outstanding one.  A lot of the noteworthy, outstanding ones are very conservative and orthodox.  Pope Francis has, at the same time, criticized the American Church for being in essence conservative and not on board with a lot of what he's trying to do, although it's quite difficult to tell what Pope Francis is trying to do.

He's trying to do something with Fiducia Supplicans.

Fiducia Supplicans was hugely upsetting to a lot of orthodox and conservative Catholics.

I've discussed it elsewhere, but one of the things that I noted is that I sort of think I see the failure to recognize a trend at work here.  The Western World, following World War Two, used its fast wealth to expand its wealth to the point where most of the problems that predated 1945 didn't really impact us the way they used to.  We've always wondered what we'd do if had a lot of time and money on our hands, and it turns out that we think only of ourselves, and then we begin to think a lot about our genitals.  It probably makes sense on an evolutionary biological level, but it's resulted in a lot of disorder and falsity.  

And because it's been misunderstood, throughout the West, people have convinced themselves that the whole world is discovering that "homosexuality" and "transgenderism" have been deeply hidden wide spared human traits when, in fact, there's no good evidence f that at all, and the former characterization is actually scientifically suspect, and the latter one doesn't even exist.  The Church in the West, urged on by those who believe that if only this was understood, or in some liberal quarters accommodated, has a significant element working on this topic in the belief that only if some accommodation could be reached, all those with these sexual attributes would come back to Mass.

In the wider world, however, the West is declining and the Church in other regions rising.  People in Africa and Asia look at this and think the West has gone nuts, and in fact most people in most regions of the globe do not view this as conduct that's normal, but the opposite.  And scientifically, they're likely right. So the global trend is Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular is towards orthodoxy.  Indeed, the young everywhere are turning towards conservatism and orthodoxy.  It's hard for leadership of major institutions to realize this, however, as they're focused on the West, where while this has probably jumped the shark it's not obvious, and they remain lead by the Baby Boom generation which is focused on the trends of its own era.

Fiducia Supplicans caused quite a reaction based on a person's position and region. The Church in Africa pretty much said it wasn't going there, blessing wise.  Pope Francis made a later statement which upset some people by excepting the African attitude as cultural, which again is something I feel that wasn't accurately assessed.  Fiducia Supplicans, changes no doctrine at all, of course, but its the focus on it that caused ire in conservative quarters, as it seems to be focused on homosexuality, and it was misunderstood at first as to its application.  

In the US a few Bishops in written statements, and some individual priests publically, have taken the Pope's direction to reflect on how to apply it locally and determined not to apply it.  The Vatican in January indicated that Bishops should not stop priests from applying it.  In Wyoming, not much was said of any official nature at all.  

Now Bishop Biegler has, in the Wyoming Catholic Register.  While it is a copyrighted article, as we're commenting on it, we're going to set the entire article out below.

Questions have arisen about the blessing that may be given to couples in same-sex unions or in heterosexual unions lived outside of a Church marriage, as stated in Fiducia Supplicans (FS). So, I would like to address the major concerns. First, Pope Francis did not change the doctrine of marriage. He stated clearly, “Since the Church has always considered only those sexual relations that are lived out within marriage to be morally licit, the Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice” (11, FS).

A Gesture of Pastoral Closeness

Thus, a liturgical blessing is not to be given, but a pastoral blessing may be given. As explained by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), “non-ritualized blessings are not a consecration of the person nor of the couple who receives them, they are not a justification of all their actions, and they are not an endorsement of the life that they lead.” Instead a pastoral blessing is a “simple gesture of pastoral closeness.” It expresses the all-encompassing love of God for his children in every circumstance of their lives.

Knowing that they cannot receive Communion, people come forward in the procession seeking a blessing. They want to feel God’s closeness. The priest or deacon asks no questions about the person’s moral life, but simply offers a prayer or blessing. After Mass, often people ask for a blessing over their family, which is given without any inquiry about their marital status. These pastoral blessings express God’s closeness. Pope Francis said, “When a couple spontaneously comes and asks [a priest] for this [blessing], it is not the union that is blessed but simply the persons who together have asked for the blessing.” He explained that “the intention of the pastoral and spontaneous blessings is to show concretely the closeness of the Lord and of the church to all those who, finding themselves in different situations, ask help to continue—sometimes to begin—a journey of faith.”

Some Catholics have expressed concern that people could misinterpret the meaning of a pastoral blessing given to couples who are in a union not officially recognized by the Church. Thus, it is essential to differentiate between a liturgical blessing and a pastoral blessing. The DDF stated, “The real novelty of this Declaration … is not the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations. It is the invitation to distinguish between two different forms of blessings: ‘liturgical or ritualized’ and ‘spontaneous or pastoral.’”

Confidence in Christ’s Blessing

Yet, there is another significant teaching in Fiducia Supplicans that merits our attention. How strongly it expresses God’s merciful love! This is one reason why many are distraught by FS. Since the beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis’ proclamation of mercy has been embraced by the multitude but rejected by a vociferous minority. FS, once again, firmly proclaims that God’s mercy must be extended to every single person.

The opposition of FS focuses overwhelmingly on blessing those in same-sex relationships rather than those many more men and women who are in heterosexual relationships not deemed valid

by the Church. There is a unique prejudice against people in same-sex unions. They are seen with contempt, like the way Jews looked upon tax collectors.

As a tax collector, Saint Matthew proclaims mercy poignantly. He portrays Christ challenging us to imitate the Father’s mercy. One of my favorite passages is, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:44-45). Do we really believe that our heavenly Father bestows mercy on the just and unjust? Are we seeking to be children of our heavenly Father by extending his love to everyone, the bad and the good alike?

Fiducia Supplicans begins with a quote from Pope Francis who reminds us: “The great blessing of God is Jesus Christ … He is a blessing for all humanity, a blessing that has saved us all. He is the Eternal Word, with whom the Father blessed us ‘while we were still sinners’ (Romans 5:8), as Saint Paul says. He is the Word made flesh, offered for us on the cross.” Are we confident in the blessing that Christ freely offered to sinners? As Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus teaches us, this confidence “is the sole path that leads us to the Love that grants everything.

With confidence, the wellspring of grace overflows into our lives … It is most fitting, then, that we should place heartfelt trust not in ourselves but in the infinite mercy of a God who loves us unconditionally … The sin of the world is great but not infinite, whereas the merciful love of the Redeemer is indeed infinite” (22, FS).

Surprised by Mercy

Micah Kiel wrote: “Mercy is the surprise that people don’t want because it means they have no way of predicting what God will do and to whom God will do it” (America, John Martens, Jan. 5, 2024). For some, this is unnerving, and they react with fear. They see Pope Francis as causing confusion in the Church. Yet, he is actually calling us to internalize Christ’s mercy and boldly proclaim it to the world.

Some protest saying that we need both mercy and truth. Fiducia begins by affirming the truth of Church teaching on marriage, and it proclaims the truth of God’s unconditional blessing for all. Francis challenges us with the truth of mercy. In Amoris Laetitia, he reminded us of the primacy of mercy as we proclaim the truth of the Gospel.

He wrote, “… although it is quite true that concern must be shown for the integrity of the Church’s moral teaching, special care should always be shown to emphasize and encourage the highest and most central values of the Gospel, particularly the primacy of charity as a response to the completely gratuitous offer of God’s love. At times we find it hard to make room for God’s unconditional love in our pastoral activity. We put so many conditions on mercy that we empty it of its concrete meaning … 

That is the worst way of watering down the Gospel … mercy is the fullness of justice and the most radiant manifestation of God’s truth. For this reason, we should always consider ‘inadequate any theological conception which in the end puts in doubt the omnipotence of God and, especially, his mercy’” (Amoris Laetitia, 311).

As we ponder God’s indiscriminate mercy, I will end with a challenge by James Alison, who wrote, “learn to perceive people you might have despised as ‘blessable’ rather than ‘contemptible,’ and then let God’s subtle grace sort out the efficacy of blessing in their – our – lives” (The Tablet, Jan. 4, 2024).

Now Wyoming's Catholics have the Bishop's official view. 

Nothing that he has said is theologically shocking in any fashion.  I'ts all correct.  So people ought to lay off, right?

Well, I doubt they will, if for no other reason than that he didn't 1) say he didn't like it, and 2) seems to support it.

Well, he clearly supports it.

That reason is what will make him unpopular right there.

As noted, this article is in fact very orthodox.  And Bishop Biegler deserves credit for being the first person I've seen to clearly explain the difference between the two categories of blessing the document addresses.  I really hadn't followed that before.

Still, a couple of things.

One thing is a stylistic matter. Bishop Biegler, like the Pope, likes to use "!".

The exclamation mark ought to be eschewed in any serious writing.  It just doesn't work, and it tends to cause most educated readers to be a bit disdainful of whatever was just accented through its use.  

The other is, however, that Bishop Biegler is being mildly disdainful of those who are concerned about Fiducia Supplicans, suggesting that they don't appreciate the inclusiveness of Christianity or that they are dismissive of God's mercy.  And indeed, some of the critics can rightfully be criticized for that.

But some cannot.  Some are concerned that the blessings will in fact be focused exclusively on homosexual couples, and they are at least corrected to that extent, and that this will give the illusion that it approved of, and lead to more.

In fact, the argument, noted here, that the text doesn't really address homosexuality specifically and would also apply to other people with irregular sexual unions, while noted elsewhere, sort of begs a set of questions.

A major part of those conventional sexual unions is that they are conventionally oriented and a lot of them are capable of being directly addressed without undue complication, for one thing.  Couples that are having sex and aren't married, can get married, assuming there's no impediment to that.  If they can't get married, there are things that can be followed up upon there, not all of which are easy to address, of course.  The most complicated one is couples that have married outside the Church where there is an impediment to marriage, such as one party being previously married and incapable of obtaining an annulment, but that's really the most difficult one.  Probably the last example is the only one in which people might routinely present themselves for a blessing, feeling themselves outside of things but wanting in.  I'm sure that does occur.  But that this has occured for a long time is well known.

And indeed, it is once again particularly European, oddly enough.  Divorce and remarriage are not unknown in the US, and there's been a lot of focus in the US Church for decades, I'd argue too much attention in fact, as it's given the illusion that it's a problem, but more or less just that.  It's more than that. But ecumenical practices in Europe have so blurred the lines that it's hard for couples in some regions, particularly in Northern Europe where the Lutheran and Catholic Churches are both common, to appreciate that these things matter.

At any rate, blessings of individuals occurring were already occurring, and therefore the development of this topic probably wasn't necessary.  The presumption that this was focused on homosexuality and licensing it, to a degree, was inevitable and unnecessary, even if the latter isn't the aim.

Indeed, on that, at least one Bishop in the US issued a letter that his parishioners would inevitably see it that way, so the blessing should not occur.  I guess the Vatican's statement in January overrides this.

Well, what about here?

I don't think it'll happen much.  I hope that people in these situations apply the entire topic correctly, and all are to be sympathized with, including the Priests that find themselves in the midst of it.

And there's one more thing.

The Bishop seems to indicate that those concerned about, and I'm saying concerned about not opposed, to, Fiducia Supplicans are acting with a sort of contempt, and based upon the reading of it, sort of a contempt either for this focus in the Latin Rite of the Church, or upon people who identify as homosexuals or transgendered.  Some people are, but some people are acting out of concern for the normalization of something that may very well reflect a cultural trend, rather than an organic existential reality.

And this gets back to this.  It's the Western World that's fascinated with homosexuality and which thinks transgenderism is a thing.  Homosexuality is not regarded in the same fashion as the West views it in most of the world, and indeed, as we've posted here before, in large sections of Asia it's regarded as a Western cultural thing, and there are a couple of aboriginal groups in African in which it's wholly unknown.  We don't know the origin of either category, but the categories themselves are fairly new.  Homosexuality, as we know to conceive of it, came about as a Western cultural category only within the last 150 years, and transgenderism only much more recently.  Given that most of the world's population isn't European, there's reason to doubt that recognizing these categories as bonafide ingrained traits is anything more than a passing trend, much like the European dominance of global culture itself.

And even in Europe, as opposed to the United States (which has a European culture) real doubt is now being cast on transgenderism.  The US is very behind the curve on this.

Given this, this focus may do something that isn't helpful, which is to focus.  While it is inaccurate, there's already a concept in much of non-Catholic American culture that the ranks of the Catholic religious are filled with homosexuals and even some Catholics remain convinced that there are pools of underground homosexuals in the same ranks, something that might actually have been somewhat true, but not nearly to the extent imagined, in the 70s and 80s.  Convincing orthodox Christians that the Catholic Church, which is generally a bastion of orthodoxy, isn't being influenced in this direction isn't helped by this focus.

And it will retard progress towards a reunion with the Orthodox, something that needs to happen but which we never quite get to. Already one Eastern European Orthodox Bishop who was getting very friendly with the Catholic Church as stated that Fiducia Supplicans will prevent a reunion.

Again, Bishop Biegler has not stated anything that isn't squarely orthodox in his letter.  But his focus on Bishop Hart demonstrated a looking back on an era which for most Wyoming Catholics didn't have much relevance to their current lives.  Fiducia Supplicans, while not saying anything revolutionary about doctrine either, can't help but focus on a topic which, in a greater sense, may not be relevant to much of the Universal Church, and which may actually reflect a passing concern of a passing culture to a degree.

Related threads:

What if the Western World is the "special case"?

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures

The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures: 

Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures

Lex Anteinternet: Contrary to our natures: 

Contrary to our natures

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.

 

The pondering professor of our Laws of History thread.

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.

Lex Anteinternet: Kill and eat. The deeply unnatural, and rather odd...

Lex Anteinternet: Kill and eat. The deeply unnatural, and rather odd...: I suppose its indicative or our general desire to be polite, even in print while commenting, but rarely does anyone bother to take on the...

Lex Anteinternet: Rediscovering the obvious: Diet and hunting, fish...

Lex Anteinternet: Rediscovering the obvious: Diet and hunting, fish...: For those who follow dietary trends, the current in vogue diet is the "Paley\o Diet".  And for those who take the National Geograp...