Free Dave Eggers!

Posted on July 21, 2016 by awtraughber

Heroes of the FrontierHeroes of the Frontier, the newest novel by Dave Eggers, drops next Tuesday at a bookstore near you.  Eggers has been putting out some interesting, timely stuff over the last few years (from Hurricane Katrina to technology to contemporary disillusionment), so I’m curious to see how he handles a story of a mother and her two children living in the wilds of Alaska.

You can read an excerpt from the novel here thanks to the folks at Outside Online.  I’ve only skimmed the passage myself, as I’d kind of like to read things in the broader context, as they happened.  I did read a couple of paragraphs talking about the effects of “non-calendared living” on Paul and Ana, the two children in the story.  Makes you wonder how Eggers might subvert things before the novel’s end.  An excerpt from the excerpt:

In those long days at the Peterssen Mine, Paul and Ana made bows from bent sticks and rubber bands. They created and destroyed dams in the river, they piled rocks to make walls and rock castles. They read by candlelight. Josie taught Paul how to start a fire in the hearth. They napped some afternoons, and other afternoons they explored the buildings of the old mine, the midday sun coming through the porous roofs in white bolts, dozens of tiny spotlights illuminating dust and rust and tools not held for a hundred years.

There were a hundred uncomplicated hours in every day and they didn’t see a soul for weeks. Was it weeks? They no longer had a grasp of the calendar. During the day all was quiet but for the occasional scream of a bird, like a lunatic neighbor; at night, the air was alive with frogs and crickets and coyotes. Paul and Ana slept deeply and Josie hovered over them, like a cold night cloud over rows of hills warmed all day in the sun.

They were growing in beautiful ways, becoming independent, and forgetting all material concerns, were awake to the light and the land, caring more about the movement of the river than any buyable object or piece of school gossip. She was proud of them, of their purifying souls, the way they asked nothing of her now, they slept through the night, and relished the performing of chores, liked to wash their clothes—and they were immeasurably better now than they were in Ohio. They were stronger, smarter, more moral, ethical, logical, considerate, and brave. And this was, Josie realized, what she wanted most of all from her children: she wanted them to be brave. She knew they would be kind. Paul was born that way and he would make sure Ana was kind, but to be brave! Ana was inherently courageous, but Paul was learning this. He was no longer afraid of the dark, would plunge into any woods with or without a light. One day, on her way back from the woods, she caught the two of them on the hillside near the cabin, both barefoot, gently shushing through the shallow leaves with their bows, watching something invisible to her. She turned, scanned the forest, and finally saw it, a ten-point buck, walking through the birches, his back straight and proud. Her children were mirroring it on the other side of the hill, unheard by the deer. They had turned into something else entirely.

(image from amazon.com)

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A Kind of Comfortably Numb

Posted on July 21, 2016 by awtraughber

Tomorrowland was one of the more maligned and ignored “blockbusters” from the summer of 2015, which is ironic when considering the movie’s attempt at being a “canary in the coal mine concerning contemporary society.  The idea behind telling stories about the end of the world, the movie’s antagonist asserts, was to get people to do something to avert disaster.  Instead, they turned it into video games and movies, basically making themselves numb to what was actually going on around them.  Instead of being calls to action, such things normalized the worse-off reality.

There’s something of that in Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic.  He doesn’t go far as to “cry wolf” on total disaster because, after all, humans are an inventive lot.

But human beings are resilient and adaptable, we adjust to difficulties and grow accustomed to problems.  Projections that suggest we won’t are rarely plausible. . . This may sound like good news, but it isn’t.  It suggests that no action-forcing cataclysm will compel us to turn things around . . . Prophesying total meltdown is not the way to draw people’s attention to this failure to flourish.  The problem we face is not the risk of cataclysm, but the acceptance of widespread despair and disorder in the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.  We risk getting used to living in a society that denies a great many of its most vulnerable people the opportunity to thrive.

We do a great job regularly adapting to whatever the “new normal” is, it seems.  Yuval is concerned that such a disposition will work against us.  He also believes that we are so used to doomsday scenarios from both ends of the political spectrum that we assume it’s all crying wolf.  For Levin, the best message to give others comes from a common, lived experience.  “Show us people who are living life well,” he seems to suggest.  And he’s right.  I feel that way often in education, where doomsday and magic potion options abound.  Our tendency is to jump to the next easy fix, regardless of whether or not anyone has actually tried it.  So work it out first, work through the kinks, and then show us the implications and possibilities for the better solution.

Here’s the scene from Tomorrowland where Hugh Laurie’s character explains the reasoning behind his actions.  It’s actually a decent movie.  Probably a little too much build-up.  I think that it might regain some critical ground in the long run.  Guess we’ll have to wait to find out.

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The Ethic of the Age

Posted on July 20, 2016 by awtraughber

IndividualityIt’s been interesting for me to bear witness to even the small changes in thinking that have happened with high school students over the last thirteen years.  Every spring, I get to spend a quarter with seniors talking about issues like genetic engineering, abortion, and euthanasia at the intersection of ethical systems and logical fallacies, particularly as it relates to the role of the self in the decision-making process.  At its best, I love the conversation and the possibilities of understanding things of great implication for society.  At its worst, I am totally bewildered at the realization that I don’t necessarily share the same presuppositions as some of my students about some pretty significant issues.  Perhaps Yuval Levin has something to say about that in The Fractured Republic?

The ethic of our age has been aptly called expressive individualism.  That term suggests not only a desire to pursue one’s own path but also a yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity. . .

The solipsism of our age of individualism is uniquely dangerous to the institutions of moral formation.  Because much of the good they do is a function of their ability to shape and structure our desires rather than serve them, to form our habits rather than reflect them, and to direct our longings rather than simply satisfy them, these institutions stand in particular tension with the ethic of our time.

Expressive individualism.  A great and sobering phrase.  At its best, it is articulated as a kind of libertarianism, which I get.  But it’s not easy to talk ethics and issues when a hard libertarianism (or a hard moral subjectivism) steps up to the microphone.

Levin brings up a great point concerning “the solipsism of our age,” which is the question of when does someone actually become him or herself and how do “institutions of moral formation” interact with people in that mindset.  From a particularly evangelical perspective, how does the intervention of and regeneration by the Holy Spirit come into play when the particularities of personhood trump the possibility of an outside “force” who wants to make us other than what we are (because who we are is broken at the core) ?

What’s also interesting is how expressive individualism has seeped into religious language.  I have to confess some complicity here.  “Be all that God made you to be” can be one way of inadvertently buying into “the ethic of our age.”  Even the greatly lauded “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship” ideology can end in expressive individualism.  I imagine a good bit of this can be traced back to some aspects of the Protestant Reformation.

(image from advancedlifeskills.com)

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The Beginning from the End

Posted on July 19, 2016 by awtraughber

plant-new-life-largeFrom Bonhoeffer’s introduction to Creation and Fall/Temptation, his study of the early chapters of the book of Genesis:

The Church of Christ bears witness to the end of all things.  It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.  “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.  Behold, I am doing a new thing” (Isaiah 43.18-19).  The new is the real end of the old; Christ is the new.  Christ is the end of the old.  he is not a continuation of the old; he is not its aiming point, nor is he a consummation upon the line of the old; he is the end and therefore the new.

Within the old world the Church speaks of the new world.  And because the Church is more certain of the new world than of anything else, it recognizes the old world only in the light of the new.  The old world cannot take pleasure in the Church because the Church speaks of its end as thought it had already happened– as though the world had already been judged.  The old world does not like being regarded as dead.  The church has never been surprised at this, nor is it surprised by the fact that again and again men come to it who think the thoughts of the old world– and who is there entirely free of them?  But the Church is naturally in tumult when these children of the world that has passed away lay claim to the Church, to the new, for themselves.  They want the new and only know the old.  And thus they deny Christ the Lord.  Yet the Church, which knows the end, knows also of the beginning . . .

The Church doe all this because it is grounded upon the testimony of Holy Scripture.  The Church of Holy Scripture– and there is no other “Church”– lives from the end.  Therefore it reads all Holy Scripture as the book of the end, of the new, of Christ.  What does Holy Scripture, upon which the Church of Christ is grounded, have to say of the of the creation and the beginning except that only from Christ can we know what the beginning is?  The Bible is nothing but the book upon which the Church stands.  This is its essential nature, or it is nothing.  Therefore the Scriptures need to be read and proclaimed wholly from the viewpoint of the end.  Thus the creation story should be read in church in the first place inly from Christ, and not until then as leading to Christ.  We can read towards Christ only if we know that Christ is the beginning, the new and the end of our world.

I used part of this in a sermon that I preached yesterday this past Sunday morning about Paul’s “rule” that a life of “new creation” is what truly matters.  I like Bonhoeffer’s approach here, though I have not always approached Hebrew Scriptures in the way he advises here.  I do think it interesting that he thinks of the Church as being “more certain of the new world than of anything else, it recognizes the old world only in the light of the new.”  It’s a hopeful statement, and not one that I immediately think of as true in these days.  How great it would be, though, if he was correct on that point?

(image from digital-photo-secrets.com)

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Transformation Documentation

Posted on July 19, 2016 by awtraughber

In many ways, Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is a documentation of the broad changes in American culture over the last century.  He does that on a large scale (and in large chunks) with his “ages” of conformity, frenzy, and anxiety.  And he does it on a smaller scale when looking at four particularly economic transformations that are good to be aware of: globalization, automation, immigration, and consumerization.

Globalization, of course, is more present in the popular vocabulary now because of events like the British referendum to leave the EU as well as a number of other countries having “particularly populist” moments right now.  Levin on globalization’s effect on the American economy:

Globalization has increasingly meant that rather than our national economy offering fairly plentiful low-skill, medium-skill, and high-skill jobs (and therefore opportunities for people with a wide range of aptitudes and in a wide variety of circumstances), it is the global economy as a whole that features those same three categories of work.  And the United States, as the world’s wealthiest nation, has increasingly specialized in higher-skill work, while countries with lower costs of living and labor have specialized in lower-skill work.

Two other economic transformations work hand-in-glove with globalization and its effects.  Automation has to do with the number of jobs that are reproducible through mechanical means (which excludes vocations on competing ends of the spectrum).  With globalization and automation comes immigration, which is one of the touchiest subjects in our current climate.  Levin’s take:

As an influence of the labor market, immigration is almost inherently a bifurcating force.  Immigrants tend to match one of two profiles: they are either lower-skilled individuals from poor nations looking for greater opportunity through low-wage work that pays them more than they could earn at home, or they are high-skilled individuals from more advanced nations looking to benefit from the exceptional opportunities at the high reaches of the American economy.  Those with skills somewhere in the middle, and in the middle class of their own countries, are less likely to undergo the rigors of emigrating for what would often be a lateral move.  For this reason, immigration tends inherently to increase the specialization of our economy and to reinforce its bifurcation.

These three feel like “nothing new” on some level.  It’s Levin’s assertion of a fourth transformation, which he calls consumerization, that interests me most.  He asserts that the American tension between being a worker and being a consumer is fraught in new ways as our economy continues to grow and change (and specialize):

Simply put, nearly all of us in a market economy are both workers and consumers at the same time, yet our expectations of the economy in these two roles are vastly different.  As workers . . . we want well-paying jobs with appealing terms of employment, flexibility, security, and satisfaction.  As consumers, we want low-cost yet high-quality goods and services that are delivered on attractive terms.  Obviously there is a tension between these sets of expectations.

I think consumerization plays out in different ways in different areas.  You can definitely see effects in educational and religious institutions.  These are definitely trends and transformations worth thinking about . . . and finding healthy ways to talk about.

+ + + + +

Yuval Levin was recently interviewed by Ezra Klein concerning The Fractured Republic.  It’s a good podcast interview that wanders into some interesting places (including how culture and politics has changed over the last decade or so, with the early 21st century debates over stem cell research being one example).  If you’ve got the time, I think it’s worth the listen.

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Deep Enough to Dream

Posted on July 18, 2016 by awtraughber

The summer is almost over for me.  I don’t make it through a summer without thinking about the music of 1997: the self-titled studio release from Caedmon’s Call, the greatest hits album of Steven Curtis Chapman (which included “Not Home Yet” and “I Am Found in You”), and Chris Rice’s Deep Enough to Dream (both album and song).  (It was also the summer that I picked up Rich Mullins’ Songs complication).  Here’s a live recording of Rice singing “Deep Enough to Dream” and its “lazy summer afternoon.”  A classic and a favorite.

Doesn’t seem to be a lot of Rice out there online, which is unfortunate.  His music makes for great long-distance driving music.  You can check out his personal website (with his poetry and artwork) here.

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Our Sclerotic Systems

Posted on July 18, 2016 by awtraughber

too bigEven though Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is all about understanding modern-day America, it can also easily read as a parable for other institutions and organizations.  Everything is connected, of course.

So Levin’s description of our national systems and programs is particularly telling, as they are the product of specific moments but have been perpetuated long beyond that moment.  He calls these systems sclerotic:

But the truest models of sclerosis in our time are the public institutions that hail from the era of consolidation.  These are the centralized, bureaucratized programs and agencies at all levels of government (from Medicare to state welfare agencies to large school districts, among many others) that persist is the model of midcentury technocracy. . . These institutions have not kept pace with our changing society, but because our political debates are themselves deeply nostalgic, we tend to argue about whether such institutions should be kept as they are or government should be rolled back to what it was before they existed—neither of which looks very plausible.

And so you end up “stuck” with programs that have inadvertently become “sacred cows” of the national structure.  The same thing plays out often in smaller organizations and institutions.  The debate around these “sacred cows” reeks of dysfunction (and many in the conversation can sense it).  The programs remind us, though, of “better days” and have become so intrinsic to a form of group identity that it feels like a real damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t situation.

In my mind, this serves as a cautionary tale for implementing “big solutions” to anything. In the end, everyone gets “taxed,” from those who implement, those who maintain, and even those who benefit.  I think of Wendell Berry’s assertion that there are no good big solutions for big problems, only a good collection of small solutions.  That approach, of course, can lend to its own kind of chaos.  Regardless, a certain kind of humility mixed with a particular creativity seems to be necessary for understanding and success here.

(image from kassoon.com)

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Renorming (and who benefits)

Posted on July 16, 2016 by awtraughber

NormI believe it was marketing guru Seth Godin who introduced me to the idea that history may not repeat, but it definitely rhymes.  That’s the sense you get when reading Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic.  Sometimes patterns and trends really do exist, really do play out in history.  Case in point: the idea of times of cultural crisis resulting in something different (though perhaps not “new”).  From Levin on what happened in the 1970s after the shifts in the 50s and 60s towards individualism:

Americans thus sought a cure for the malaise and pandemonium of the 1970s not through the revival of an old consolidating tendency, but through the maturation of the new spirit of individualism and liberation.  There was no fighting the core fact of postwar America—the fact of an intensifying deconsolidation—but there could be better ways to live it.  The spirit of individualism, the nation could readily see, had gone too far and grown too wild.  America’s old norms no longer held sway.  But people cannot long abide an absence of norms, and so in the course of the later 1970s and into the 1980s, American society went through what political scientist Francis Fukuyama, in his 1999 book The Great Disruption, called a “renorming.”  This meant not the recovery of old cultural rules and taboos, but the development of new ones.  These new norms were rooted in the new ethic of individualism but geared to giving people’s lives some stability and structure.

And because everything is connected, there are obvious economic consequences to such shifting and renorming (into what Levin asserts is a more diffuse society).

Over and over, the effects of America’s diffusion, and then of its efforts to adjust to that diffusion, seemed to reach the wealthy and advantaged as rewards, but hit the poor and disadvantaged as punishments.  If the new American ethic pushes every individual to become more like himself or herself, rather than more like everyone else, it will, even at its best, tend to accentuate differences, to increases distances, and to turn a range of distinctions into a set of bifurcations.

What’s true of the 70s is also true of this decade in the 21st century.

I think it was an episode of Sherlock, though I cannot say with certainty, where I learned one question that could lead to a world of learning: the question of “who benefits.”  For all the good that certain changes are doing for certain groups of people, those changes are doing something even better for others.

You can get a copy of Levin’s The Fractured Republic here or at any reputable bookstore.

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Pokemon Go as Reality Filter?

Posted on July 15, 2016 by awtraughber

pokemon go

(Pokémon Go/Gustave Caillebotte, “Le Pont de l’Europe,” 1876 from CityLab.com)

Nicholas Carr (writer of The Shallows and The Glass Cage) recently posted his own “take” on the Pokemon Go/augmented reality discussion, mostly from the vantage point of art and Instagram.  The article starts with one of Carr’s own “Theses in Tweetform”: Instagram shows us what a world without art looks like.  And it gets even better from there.

The article is great and can be read here.  I really liked the image that he used, so I traced it back to its source, CityLab.com.  They had also posted an article about Pokemon Go and augmented reality, comparing it to Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and the French idea of the flaneur.  It’s a much more graceful reading of the moment.  You can read that article here.

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You Are Here (When Is That?)

Posted on July 15, 2016 by awtraughber

Pushpin on map

The first half of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is an attempt to explain the contemporary American landscape by revisiting the major trends of the twentieth century.  It’s a tall order that, from my perspective, he handles well and without much repetition.  This, of course, helps flesh out his assertion that both of America’s major political parties are trapped in an unhealthy nostalgia trap.

Levin calls (roughly) the first half of the twentieth century in America an “age of conformity.”  This includes, of course, both world wars and the depression in between.

In very broad terms, the first half of the twentieth century (and the final decades of the nineteenth) can be seen as an age of growing consolidation and cohesion in American life.  As our economy industrialized, the government grew more centralized, the culture became for aggregated through mass media, and national identity and unity were frequently valued above personal identity, individuality, and diversity. … become more like everyone else.

Levin does a great job of teasing out the connective tissue in these different areas, particularly in how the common cause of war and economic collapse put many (though not all) Americans on some kind of “same page.”  When the second World War was over, though, all bets were off.  Which led to what Levin labels an “age of frenzy.”

The second half of the twentieth century and the opening years  of the twenty-first have instead been marked by growing deconsolidation and decentralization. The culture has become increasingly variegated, the economy has diversified and become more deregulated, and individualism and personal identity have triumphed over conformity and national unity.  In these years, a great many of the more powerful forces in American life have been pushing every American not to become more like everyone else, but to be more fully himself or herself.

Levin points to the psycho-social impetus that came about through books on child-rearing and Americanized approaches to self-awareness and self-fulfillment.  The concepts of consolidation and centralization are key to understanding Levin’s argument on multiple levels.  The two concepts work hand-in-hand even as they work against one another, and interesting symbiosis.

All of this leads to what Levin calls an “age of anxiety.”  Part of this anxiety comes from a what Levin calls a “hollowing out” of America in a number of areas, which results in concentrations “on the fringe” instead of “in the middle.”  In this age, centralization works differently, too.

Growing concentration and diminishing centralization are therefore not opposite forces, but increasingly complementary patterns in our times—both embodied in the bifurcation of American life.  This peculiar combination is closely related to the tendency toward a greater centralization of power in the federal government to accompany greater individualism in the culture and economy.  Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the  mediating institutions—family, community, church, unions, and others—fade and falter.  Again, we find concentration at the ends and a growing vacuum in the middle.

Such bifurcated concentration also involves a kind of constriction of movement or change—a sense in which everyone is always in the process of becoming more like what they already are.  This phenomenon presents itself as more constrained mobility in our economy, as a growing rigidity in our politics, and as a narrowing of the radius of trust in the larger society.

The idea of a society made up solely of individuals and the state (or nation) is key in understanding his approach to potential solutions for our country.

(image from timemanagementninja.com)

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