Mondays
There is nothing so dispiriting as coming into your "good" office job after a weekend of working cattle.
Showing posts with label Agrarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agrarianism. Show all posts
Lex Anteinternet: Mondays
Lex Anteinternet: Mondays:
There is nothing so dispiriting as coming into your "good" office job after a weekend of working cattle.
There is nothing so dispiriting as coming into your "good" office job after a weekend of working cattle.
QC: Japan & the bomb (p12) | Wednesday, October 18, 2023
This the final part of a twelve part series by Fr. Joseph Krupp on the war against Japan during World War Two, culminating in the decision to drop the two atomic bombs in August, 1945.
So why am I linking this in here?
Indeed, this entire series is teed up to appear on Lex Anteinternet in August, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two and the dropping of the two bombs. This 12th installment, however, deals with post war Japan for the most part.
A lot of people know that Douglas MacArthur wrote the Japanese constitution, or caused it be written. Fewer know that he reworked the Japanese economy, although I did. Japan is one of the few modern nations which is regarded as having incorporated a significant degree of agrarianism and distributism into its modern economy, although that's long enough ago that a lot of it is likely lost now.
The discussion on that is well worth listening too here, and goes beyond the situation of Japan itself, and into a agro distributist economy to some degree in general.
Lex Anteinternet: Elemental activities.
Lex Anteinternet: Elemental activities.:
Elemental activities.
Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig, and those that would not should be compelled by force.
Hilaire Belloc
Lex Anteinternet: A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.
Lex Anteinternet: A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death...:
A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.
A really old friend of mine and I were talking about it just last week.
I had to catch up with him as he was working on something for me. It was Friday, but I was fairly formally dressed and he noted it. The reason was that I had just come from my uncle's funeral earlier that day. He extended his sympathies, but I noted that my uncle had lived a long and good life. Not a life free of troubles, as no such thing existed, but a long life, that was well lived, and he'd remained sharp right up until the end. His health had declined in recent years, but only in very recent ones. It was the last few months that were rough.
My friend and I, who first knew each other as National Guardsmen back in the 80s, are co-religious. Neither of us was married when we first met, but both of us have, and have seen our kids grow up since then. And of course, we've seen our parents pass away, his before mine. He has siblings, which I do not, and one of his brothers died, only in his 50s. I noted that in the Middle Ages, people often prayed for good deaths, and he noted that a prayer group that he's in now does that every week.
Prayer for a Happy Death
O God, great and omnipotent judge of the living and the dead, we are to appear before you after this short life to render an account of our works. Give us the grace to prepare for our last hour by a devout and holy life, and protect us against a sudden and unprovided death. Let us remember our frailty and mortality, that we may always live in the ways of your commandments. Teach us to "watch and pray" (Lk 21:36), that when your summons comes for our departure from this world, we may go forth to meet you, experience a merciful judgment, and rejoice in everlasting happiness. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
I'm constantly amazed by people who work into old age, as I'd judge it, and keeping working. A dear friend of mine, now in his 70s, noted that just the other day. He doesn't have to, he just is. Likewise, I know a collection of lawyers who fit that description. The law is a hard job, surrounded by hard facts, hard people, and difficult scenarios
I think they just know nothing else, their real personalities, perhaps, burnt to the core eons ago.
In contrast, I'm also constantly amazed by those who have extensive plans for their retirements well before they can retire. Another friend of mine fits this category, but when I look at him, I can tell his physical condition is so poor it'd be amazing if he lives long enough to retire. It's one of those things where you don't know what to say. If you were to be blunt, you'd say that the dreams of early retirement are probably forlorn, but that his dreams of retiring at all may be foreclosed by a bad early death, if some correction isn't made soon, and those corrections are harder to make once you are past your 30s.
The call came to my wife on Saturday. I could tell from the tone what the topic was, without even being told. A relative of hers was on his way to the hospital by helicopter. Even though he was being sent in, in that fashion, I knew, but did not say it, that he'd not make it. I'm not even sure if he wanted to.
And so another death.
In this case, unlike my uncle, he was much younger. My age, in fact. I hadn't seen him for many years, and before his troubles really set in. He hadn't been able to adjust to them well. The most common comment from people, none of whom were surprised, was that his torment was over.
I don't have any big plans, like one of my friends, for retirement. I hope to be healthy, and just become more of an agrarian-killetarian than I presently am. Funny thing is that recently I've been running into people who claim "you're looking really good". Somebody asked me the other day, indeed at the funeral gathering, "you're working out", the question in the form of a statement. Not really.
Indeed, I've gained some weight I seemingly just can't lose, which I think is the byproduct of my thyroid medicine, which has made me hungry, and I know that I'm not in the physical condition I was before my recent health troubles commenced. People close to me just won't accept that, which brings me to the other side of the retirement coin noted above. Some lawyers I know are already planning for me to work into my 70s, as that's the thing to do, apparently. Long-suffering spouse, for her part, won't say something like that, but from an ag family, she doesn't really accept the concept of retirement anyhow. Having said that, I wouldn't plan on my retiring from the ag operation either.
It finally occured to me, however, what's different about agricultural jobs as opposed to others, at least if you are an owner of the enterprise or part of it. The occupation itself is existentially human. It is, if you will, an Existential Occupation, or at least it is right now. The mindless gerbil like advance of "progress" may ruin that and reduce it to just another occupation.
Existential Occupations are ones that run with our DNA as a species. Being a farmer/herdsman is almost as deep in us as being a hunter or fisherman, and it stems from the same root in our being. It's that reason, really, that people who no longer have to go to the field and stream for protein, still do, and it's the reason that people who can buy frozen Brussels sprouts at Riddleys' still grown them on their lots. And its the reason that people who have never been around livestock will feel, after they get a small lot, that they need a cow, a goat, or chickens. It's in us. That's why people don't retire from real agriculture.
It's not the only occupation of that type, we might note. Clerics are in that category. Storytellers and Historians are as well. We've worshiped the Devine since our onset as a species, and we've told stories and kept our history as story the entire time. They're all existential in nature. Those who build certain things probably fit into that category as well, as we've always done that. The fact that people tinker with machinery as a hobby would suggest that it's like that as well.
Indeed, if it's an occupation. . . and also a hobby, that's a good clue that its an Existential Occupation.
If I were to retire from my career, which I can't right now, I wouldn't be one of those people who spend their time traveling to Rome or Paris or wherever. I have very low interest in doing that. I'd spend my time writing, fishing, hunting, gardening (and livestock tending). That probably sounds pretty dull to most people. I could imagine myself checking our Iceland or Ireland, or fjords in Norway, but I likely never will.
What I can't imagine myself doing is imagining that age and decline don't occur, and that I should be in court in my 70s. I don't think that the lawyers who do that realize that younger lawyers don't admire that, and most of the lawyers I'm running into in court are younger than me now.
And indeed, frankly, it isn't admirable. People who work a hard non-existential job and keep at it into their advanced old age, or at least past their 7th decade, have just lost something they were when they were young, and much of that is themselves. They've lost who they were.
AN ACT OF FAITH IN ANTICIPATION OF THE HOUR OF DEATH
From the works of St. Pompilio M. Pirrotti
On my journey toward eternity, dear Lord,
I am surrounded by powerful enemies of my soul.
I live in fear and trembling,
especially at the thought of the hour of death,
on which my eternity will depend,
and of the fearful struggle that the devil will then have to wage against me,
knowing that little time is left for him to accomplish my eternal ruin.
I desire, therefore, O Lord,
to prepare myself for it from this hour,
by offering you now, in view of my last hour,
my profession of faith and love for you,
which is so effectual in repressing and rendering useless
all the crafty and wicked schemes of the enemy
and which I resolve to oppose to him at that moment of such grave consequence,
even though he should dare alone to attack with his deceits
the peace and tranquility of my spirit.
I N.N.,
in the presence of the Most Holy Trinity,
the blessed Virgin Mary,
my holy Guardian Angel
and the entire heavenly host,
affirm that I wish to live and die under the standard of the Holy Cross.
I firmly believe all that our Holy Mother,
the holy, catholic and apostolic Church,
believes and teaches.
It is my steadfast intention to die in this holy faith,
in which all the holy martyrs, confessors and virgins of Christ have died,
as well as all those who have saved their souls.
If the devil should tempt me to despair
because of the multitude and grievousness of my sins,
I affirm that from this day forth
I firmly hope in the infinite mercy of God,
which will not let itself be overcome by my sins,
and in the Precious Blood of Jesus
which has washed all my sins away.
If the devil should assail me with temptations to presumption
by reason of the small amount of good
which by the help of God
I may have been able to accomplish,
I confess from this day forth
that I deserve eternal separation from God
a thousand times by my sins
and I entrust myself entirely
to the infinite goodness of God,
through whose grace alone I am what I am.
Finally, if the evil spirit should suggest to me
that the pains inflicted upon me by our Lord
in that last hour of my life
are too heavy to bear,
I affirm now that all will be as nothing
in comparison with the punishments I have deserved throughout life.
In the bitterness of my soul
I call to remembrance all my years;
I see my iniquities, I confess them and detest them.
Ashamed and sorrowful I turn to you,
my God, my Creator and my Redeemer.
Forgive me, O Lord, by the multitude of your mercies;
forgive your servant whom you have redeemed by your Precious Blood.
My God, I turn to you, I call upon you, I trust in you;
to your infinite goodness
I commit the entire reckoning of my life.
I have sinned greatly, O Lord:
enter not into judgment with your servant,
who surrenders to you
and confesses his guilt.
Of myself I cannot make satisfaction to you for my countless sins:
I do not have the means to pay you for my infinite debt.
But your Son has shed his Blood for me,
and greater than all mine sins is your mercy.
O Jesus, be my Saviour!
At the hour of my fearful crossing to eternity
put to flight the enemy of my soul;
grant me grace to overcome every difficulty,
for you alone do mighty wonders.
Lord,
according to the multitude of your tender mercies
I shall enter into your dwelling place.
Trusting in your pity,
I commend my spirit into your hands!
May the Blessed Virgin Mary
and my Guardian Angel
accompany my soul into the heavenly country. Amen.
We should all hope and indeed pray for a happy death. And perhaps we should pray for a happy life, which is one worthwhile. That doesn't, quite frankly, include the "I'm going to work here at my desk until I die". That's surrendering to fear or meaningless, in most cases.
Again, there are exceptions. People with Existential Occupations, people who own their own special business, and the like. The list can't really be set out in full.
That doesn't include pouring through the latest edition of the IRS code for deductions, or reading the Restatement (Second) of Torts, or engineering an oilfield implement.
A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 7. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? Wouldn't every one be just bored and poor?
His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.
Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.
So we've gone through this and lamented on the state of the world.
We looked at how working for largely local businesses, in an economy in which most were local, would work, in terms of economics.
In other words, if you needed an appliance, and went to Wally's Appliance Store, owned and operated by Wally, rather than Walmart, owned and operated by anonymous corporate shareholders, how would that look?
And we looked at something more radical yet, Agrarianism.
So how does this all tie together, and what difference would it really make?
Let's revisit the definition of Agrarianism.
Given the above, isn't Agrarianism simply agricultural distributism?
Well, no.
Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of societyBradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.
Agrarianism is agriculture oriented on an up close and personal basis, and as such, it's family oriented, and land ethic oriented.
We also noted that agrarianism as we define it incorporates The Land Ethic, which holds:
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.
So what would this mean to society at large, and a distributist society at that?
To start with, it would mean a lot more family farm operations, and no remotely owned and operated ones where the land was held by Bill Gates or the Chinese Communist Party. Combined with Distributism, it would also mean a lot more local processing of agricultural products. Local packing houses, local flour mills, local bakeries.
It would also mean a society that was focused on local ownership of homes with residents who lived a more local, land ethic focused, lives.
Indeed, the local would matter much more in general.
And with it, humanity.
There would still be the rich and the poor, but not the remote rich and the ignorable poor.
Most people would be in the middle, and most of them, owning their own. They'd be more independent in that sense, and therefore less subject to the whims of remote employers, economic interests, and politicians.
All three major aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, humanity, subsidiarity, and solidarity, coming together.
An agrarian society would be much less focused on "growth", if focused on it at all. Preservation of agricultural and wild lands would be paramount. People would derive their social values in part from that, rather than the host of panem et circenses distractions they now do, or at least they could.
They'd derive their leisure from it as well, and therefore appreciate it more. If hiking in a local park, or going fishing, or being outdoors in general is what we would do, and we very much would as the big mega entertainment sources of all types are largely corporate in nature, preservation of the wild would be important.
And this too, combined with what we've noted before, a distributist society and a society that was well-educated, would amount to a radical, and beneficial, reorientation of society.
We won't pretend that such a society would be prefect. That would be absurd. Human nature would remain that. All the vices that presently exist, still would, but with no corporate sources to feed them, they'd not grow as prominent.
And we will state that it would cure many of the ills that now confront us.
Such a society would force us to confront our nature and nature itself. And to do so as a party of a greater community, for our common good.
Which, if we do not end up doing, will destroy us in the end.
Last prior:
A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 6. Politics
Directly related:
Finis
Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week at Work: Driving pigs, September 15, 1916
Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week at Work: Driving pigs, September 15, 1916:
LOC Title: "Driving boy" taking pigs to market. Says he is 14 years old and has been working with pigs for 9 years. Goes to school in Paris, Ky. Location: Winchester [vicinity], Kentucky. Published September 15, 1916
Mid Week at Work: Driving pigs, September 15, 1916
A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 5. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? The Distributist Impact
So, having published this screed over a period of days, and then dropping the topic, we resume with the question.
Why, exactly, do you think this would do a darn thing?
Well, here's why.
A daily example.
When I started this entry on Monday, March 4, I got up, fixed coffee and took the medication I'm now required to as I'm 60 years old, and the decades have caught up with me. The pills are from a locally owned pharmacy, I'd note, not from a national chain, so I did a distributist thing there. It's only one block away, and I like them. Distributism.
I toasted a bagel, as in my old age the genetic "No" for adults consuming milk has caught up with me. I got that at Albertson's and I don't know where the bagels are made. Albertson's is a national chain that's in the process of trying to merge with another national chain. Corporate Capitalism.
The coffee was Boyers, a Colorado outfit. Quasi distributist there.
I put cream cheese on the bagel. It was the Philadelphia brand. Definitely corporate capitalist there.
I'd already shaved (corporate capitalist, but subsidiarity makes that make sense).
I got dressed and headed to work. My car was one I bought used, but its make is one that used to be sold by a locally owned car dealer. No more. The manufacturers really prefer regional dealers, and that's what we have. All the cars we have come from the dealer when it was locally owned.
I don't have that option anymore. Corporate Capitalism.
In hitting the highway, I looked up the highway towards property owned by a major real estate developer/landlord. A type of corporate capitalism.
I drove past some churches and the community college on the way in. Subsidiarity.
I drove past one of the surviving fraternal clubs. Solidarity.
I drove past the major downtown churches. Solidarity.
I drove past a collection of small stores, and locally owned restaurants adn bars, and went in the buildings. Distributism.
I worked the day, occasionally dealing with the invading Colorado or other out of state firms. Corporate Capitalism.
I reversed my route, and came home.
So, in this fairly average day, in a Western midsized city, I actually encountered a fair number of things that would be absolutely the same in a Distributist society. But I encountered some that definitely ran very much counter to it.
Broadening this out.
A significant thing was just in how I ate. And I eat a lot more agrarian than most people do.
The meat in our freezer was either taken by me in the field, or a cow of our own that was culled. Most people cannot say that. But all the other food was store bought, and it was all bought from a gigantic national chain. In 1924 Casper had 72 grocers, and it was less than a quarter of its present size. In 1925, just one year later, it had 99 grocery stores. The number fell back down to 70 in 1928.
August 1923 list of grocers in Casper that sold Butternut Coffee, which was probably every grocer.
When I was a kid, the greater Casper area had Safeway, Albertson's, Buttreys and an IGA by my recollection, in the national chains. Locally, however, it had six local grocery stores, including one in the neighboring town of Mills. One located right downtown, Brattis' was quite large, as was another one located in North Casper.
Now the entire area has one local grocery store and it's a specialty store.
Examples like this abound. We have a statewide sporting goods store and a local one, but we also have a national one. The locals are holding their own. When I was young there was a locally owned store that had actually been bought out from a regional chain, and a national hardware store that sold sporting goods. So this hasn't changed a lot.
And if we go to sporting goods stores that sell athletic equipment, it hasn't either. We have one locally owned one and used to have two. We have one national chain, and used to have none.
In gas stations, we have a locally owned set of gas stations and the regional chains. At one time, we only had local stores, which were franchises. The local storefronts might be storefronts, in the case of the national chains, as well.
When I was a kid, the only restaurants that were national were the fast food franchises, which had competition from local outfits that had the same sort of fare and setting. The locals burger joints are largely gone, save for one I've never been to and which is a "sit down" restaurant, and we have national and regional restaurant chains. We retain local ones as well.
We don't have any chain bars, which I understand are a thing, and local brewing, killed off by Prohibition, has come roaring back.
We used to have a local meat processing plant that was in fact a regional one, taking in cattle from the area, and packing it and distributing it back out, including locally. There are no commercial packing plants in Wyoming now. The closest one, I think, is in Greeley Colorado, and the packing industry is highly concentrated now.
We don't have a local creamery, either. We had one of those at least into the 1940s, and probably well beyond that. The milk for that establishment was supplied by a dairy that was on the south side of town. It's no longer that and hasn't been for my entire life.
We've been invaded by the super huge law firms that are not local.
Our hospital is part of a private chain now, and there's massive discontent. That discontent took one of the county commissioners that was involved in the transfer of that entity out of county hands down in the last election. But that hasn't arrested the trend. My doctor, who I really like is part of a regional practice, not his own local one, anymore. This trend is really strong.
And then there's Walmart, the destroyer of locally owned stores of every variety.
So would distribution make anything different?
The question is asked by a variant of Wendell Berry's "what are people for", but in the form of "what is an economy for?".
It's to serve people, and to serve them in their daily lives, as people.
It's not to make things as cheap as possible.
On all of the retail things I've mentioned, every single one could be served by local retail stores. If we didn't have Albertson's, Riddleys and Smith's, we'd have a lot of John Albertson & Son's, Bill Riddley & Family, and Emiliano Smith's stores, owned by their families. If Walmart didn't exist, and moreover couldn't exist, it would be replaced locally, probably by a half dozen family owned retailers. . . or more.
Prices would in fact be higher, although there would be competition, but the higher prices would serve families who operated them, and by extension the entire community. And this is just one example.
Much of the old infrastructure in fact remains. As discussed above, numerous small businesses remain, and according to economic statistics, small business remains the number one employer in the US. But the fact is that giant chain corporations have made a devastating impact on the country, making all local business imperiled and some practically impossible to conduct.
Reversing that would totally reorient the local economy. Almost everyone would work for themselves, or for a locally owned business, owned by somebody they knew personally, and who knew them personally.
And with that reorientation, would come a reorientation of society.
We'll look at that a bit later. Let's turn towards the agrarian element next.
Last Prior:
What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 4. A Well Educated Society.
The wrong question.
I really hate headlines like this:
Bill Sniffin: Wyoming Doomed To Have No Large Cities — Why?
Why the crap would we want them, that's the question.
Success will be when we starting putting fields in where parking lots are now, in big cities, because they aren't big cities anymore.
Lex Anteinternet: Missing the point: Blog Mirror; Dennis Sun: Biden's Climate Change Actions Will Be & How They Affect Agriculture
Lex Anteinternet: Missing the point: Blog Mirror; Dennis Sun: Biden...: From the Cowboy State Daily: Dennis Sun: Biden's Climate Change Actions Will Be & How They Affect Agriculture The real thing that wi...
Missing the point: Blog Mirror; Dennis Sun: Biden's Climate Change Actions Will Be & How They Affect Agriculture
From the Cowboy State Daily:
Dennis Sun: Biden's Climate Change Actions Will Be & How They Affect Agriculture
The real thing that will affect agriculture, particularly the beef industry, is in failing to attempt to arrest climate change.
I've long been utterly baffled by; 1) grazers failure to get a clue over climate change, and 2) ongoing agricultural admiration for the Republican Party.
More than anyone, those who graze ought to be able to freakin' wake up and notice that the climate ain't what it used to be. I'll hear ranchers talk about it, but they seem incapable of closing the circle. Gee, it's been warm. Gee, it's been dry. Gee, we have no grass.
D'uh.
But climate change? Nope, not happening.
Now there are some exceptions. The late Pat O'Toole, who married into a Carbon County ranching family, was one. But by and large ranchers simply refuse to believe that something is happening, even while worrying about what is happening.
Hmmm. . .
And ironically, practices in the industry which gave it a larger carbon footprint are quite recently Older ranchers can easily look back on an industry that wasn't diesel powered.
On the GOP, ranchers seem to have a really dedicated belief that the Republican Party protects their ability to do what they want. In reality, the Democrats have preserved ranch lands themselves. The GOP is more of the development party, which never ends up actually benefitting ranchers. I'll them complain about this too, but not close the circle. Why is this oil company in my pasture? Why are squatters trailers showing up all over. Why are out of state rich buying this up and not doing anything about it?
Why indeed?
Maybe because of how we vote and whose support we choose to ignore.
What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 4. A Well Educated Society.
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
Thomas Sowell
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
Will and Ariel Durant
A democratic society, let alone a just, functioning society, can't survive or function without its citizens being solidly educated. And that means learning things you (or your parents), don't want you to, and some will fall behind, and drop out.
In envisioning how a more just society, in every fashion, and one that comports with reality, might be constructed, we have to concede that it can't be if people operate in a state of ignorance.
Unfortunately, we live in a manifestly ignorant age. This year's national political contest is ample evidence of that. On one side we have a body that's contemptuous of human nature and thinks it can be existentially and individually remade. On the other, we have a group that effectively assumes that everything that came after 1958 is existentially wrong, including every real advance in science or knowledge.
We let one generation somehow proceed into barbarity, and it's running the show right now. As part of that, one of its pet projects is to create a system where younger generations can be prevented from being educated in anything that suggest that it's really not 1958.
Getting back on track won't be easy, but it needs to be accomplished immediately.
Now first of all, we have to admit that this is not universal by any means. Contrary to what people like to assert, and often the poorly educated, there's no one educational system in the US and therefore there are school districts that are excellent. Wyoming has long been blessed by those, but even in Wyoming, modern inroads of limited education are advancing.
All of this may seem bold when we consider that high school graduation rates and university education is much more common than it used to be. The national high school graduation rate is 87%, which is massively high. The Wyoming rate is 82%. Consider this chart, for a moment (which will be hotlinked to its source).
| Table 110. | High school graduates, by sex and control of school: Selected years, 1869-70 through 2019-20 |
| —Not available. |
That's great, right?
Well, maybe.
But maybe not.
People have to know how to read statistics and what's behind them. A really well-educated friend of mine who is in obviously very poor physical shape is an example of this. HE takes his age, and likes to cite the "at my age, X% of men make it to age 90".
Well, that's because you kill off a certain percentage of men every year, meaning that your odds of making it to 90 are poorer every year. At age 90 100% of men make it to age 90, if they've lived that long. It's a diminishing number every year.
With education, the fact that 87% of people graduate from high school means, quite frankly, that extraordinary steps have been taken to make that occur. Some of the steps are good, some of them are bad, some of them are mixed. The rate itself, 87%, is pretty good proof that we run people through high school who really don't have the capacity to graduate a rigorous educational system.
As noted above, Wyoming's schools are very good. I was stunned, for example, when my daughter was in high school, and she came home and prepared for a test of Weimar Germany that was unbelievably advanced. This speaks well of our system. Also speaking well of it is that it offers advanced certificates for high school degrees, something it did not do when I graduated there in 1981.
And frankly, our community college system is excellent as well. We have only one university (which is another topic) but its good as well.
Still, I think it can be maintained that compared to the mid 20th Century, certain things have dropped off as mandatory subjects. I have around here somewhere a German novel that was my father's, from high school, and a Latin primer that was one of my uncle's (from a much different school system). There was a time when learning languages was mandatory in high school , and learning a language broadens out the welatanshung considerably, n'est pas?
One thing that had very much occured is the rise of homeschooling. People have done this for a long time, but it was almost freakishly uncommon in most areas and often due to remoteness. Starting in the 90s, however, it really grew for a variety of reasons.
One is that in some areas people lived in bad school districts where there was little opportunity for a good primary education. But another one is that, particularly amongst Protestant Evangelicals, and then spreading to Catholic Trads, who ironically sometimes hold very Protestant Evangelical societal views, that the education system was educating the young in vice and perversity. Most recently this has seen its expression by inroads onto school boards by populists who use names like "Mom's For Liberty" for their organizations.
What often characterizes these organizations is a desire to prevent education in something. It started off as early in the 1960s with an effort to prevent education on matters sexual. Interestingly, when I was in high school, in spite of living in the least religious state in the US, and one that has always had a rough and transient population, community standards remained so high that what there was in the way of sex ed was pretty minimal. I can recall that when I was in grade school we were supposed to watch films in 5th and 6th Grade, just as we were hitting our early teens. We watched one of them, but it conveyed so little information that it was truly harmless in the extreme, much less harmful than the information that was later distributed on the playground about what the next installment, which we never saw, was supposed to contain (which was, I'd note, biologically inaccurate). The next time this came up was in junior high, and then again in high school biology class, in which we were required to tell our parents they could opt us out. Nobody did. I think we received a day of education, or not more than two, on the topic, which was biological and accurate.
Of course, I grew up in the 70s for the most part, and most of the kids in school with me were locals. That might have made a big difference, as even the poor kids were from pretty stable families. Divorce was incredibly rare. A significant minority were from ranching families who were well aware of how biological processes worked (that Agrarian thing again) and therefore the knowledge wasn't shocking. As for the impact, I can recall five girls that I knew to some extent getting pregnant in high school, and one of them was married. One of the other ones was from a family where that ran through it like wildfire. The graduating class was 500 or so students, so that's not a huge number.
It's not just sex ed that caused the boom in alternative learning, however. By the 1970s evolution was an established scientific fact, even if still termed a theory, and it was taught in our schools outright. The resistance to it being taught, at that time, didn't seem to exist, but it rebounded strongly later on in much of the country. Overall, moreover, a decline in science teaching set in the U.S. during the 1980s thanks to Ronald Reagan, whose administration didn't support it.
Indeed, the Reagan administration was big on local control of things, and that has an impact here. As a Distributist, it might seem that this is one of the areas where we'd be big backers of that sort of thing, but in reality, the principal of subsidiarity advocates doing a thing at its most local effective, efficient, and just level. As knowledge is literally global, it calls for large scale. Physics and science are the same in Brooklyn as they are in Botswana.
A person might also note that our sometimes romantic attachment to Agrarianism recalls a day when less than 50% of males graduated from high school. That's quite true, but they also lived in an age in which many of them had been already well armed by their educations for the lives they would lead, so it was not accurate to suggest they were uneducated. One of my grandfathers left school (a Christian Brothers school) at age 13, and yet ran a business successfully and could do calculus. A major office building in this city is named after a man who was sent here in his early teens to open a branch of his father's pipeyard business and who went on to become a multimillionaire.
Additionally, if we go way back, we'll find that yeomanry, while they could be completely uneducated, could also be relatively well educated as well. Some were educated in basic matters through local churches, but often they were educated through community funded or subscribed schools. John Adams, who started off life as a yeoman, was educated in that fashion, and his wife ran such a school (integrated, we might note) later on.
While on it, we might as well additionally note that the American South, at least since sometime prior to the Civil War, has been a real backwater of education, something that used to horrify northerners. Little noticed, however, is that there's been a mini Great Migration of white Southerners out of their native region and into the rest of the country, where they've brought their views, including about education, with them.
And part of this is the byproduct of the 1960s. Up until the 60s, while education was massively uneven in a country that has no central education system, there was a general consensus on what a person needed to learn in order to graduate from high school. That can't really be claimed from region to region anymore.
So here, applying the principal of subsidiarity, the national government really needs to take a hand and set some basic standards, including learning the truth on scientific and historic matters. And it needs to be rigorous. If that depresses the graduation rate, so be it.
And there's really not a moment to lose.
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What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 3. Agrarianism.
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