A manafter my heart. I played a lot of corkball in a small town about 60 miles north of St. Louis.
He sounds like my father. And a colleague once asked me, "Aren't you afraid your students will become as cynicalas yyou are?" To which I repied, "No. For one thing I don't think it would hurt them any more than it has hurt me. And, two, I really don't think it's possible."
My fundamental operating is that humans are no damn good, AND they're untrustorthy.
He would say that “As Marx put it, capitalism saved people from the idiocy of rural life.”
Having grown up in a small town, I was disappointed when my grandmother—a fan of Reagan and Hollywood—told me something similar. We were sitting in the car in my mother’s garage in San Fernando Valley. I was in 6th grade. She said, “City life is better.” I disagreed with her, but of course could not persuade her. She grew up in Sterling, Illinois; me in South Lake Tahoe, California.
To counter these claims I would cite Merle Kling’s First Iron Law: Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.
I think her new life in Los Angeles was great for a while. Would have been like revelation to her. For me in 1986 it was a mess largely because of public school bussing. I probably would have preferred Sterling.
Actually, I quite liked Sterling. It was at the time I knew it best a very mixed Midwestern economy. Perhap it didn't bustle, but it wasn't down and out, either. Lots of farmers or workers who would have had jobs on the farms migrated to Sterling beginning in at least the early 1960s. They had good, middle-class lives. I'm not sure about lawns.
A departed colleague was once their city manager, and he siad that in the late 1970s-1980s it was a great place to live. Of course, it became at least partly a Rust Belt city after that.
My maternal grandparents were salt of the earth people. Baptists. My grandmother was one of nine, growing up on her family farm; her father's cannery label still shows up in re Americana decor. My grandfather came from harder sharecropper-type circumstances, with early deaths leaving him to fend for himself. As a very young man he became a stringer of the phone lines going up across middle America. When the Depression was over the two of them moved to the city, never again living a rural life, the only remnants being an effort to grow tomatoes in the poor dirt of a city yard, and his strong mechanical ability compelling him to fix anything broken and to "make-do" DIY stuff, as country people do. Kids nearly grown, she became a schoolteacher.
So: they were just part of a great migration, like others at this period.
It was a great, great thing when they were able to buy a Cadillac late in life. It was a great purchase when they bought their upholstered "living room suite" (which I think we pronounced "suit") and the zippered plastic cover that protected it. It was a great thing when their daughter was to be married, and they laid out friends' gifts on tables set up for the purpose so that the friends could come by and see their gifts among the other gifts, because - what "beautiful and useful things", for which we are grateful. [Kinda like Pampered Chef parties I used to be invited to, only no one was trying to sell anyone anything lol.] Contra Paul Fussell, I don't think the covers were a damning class marker; or perhaps they were, but nonetheless my grandmother was very much a lady, far more ladylike than I would ever be, and it was less about class, perhaps, than living through the Depression, with no fixed abode, following the phone lines, returning to the family farm to give birth - so that possessions had real value for them. They didn't do restaurants (except on Sunday, after church) or theater or movies or other such urban delights, but enjoyed their church and their social life, bowling for him and bridge for her, Shriners and Bluebirds and more such organizations. Family - the families of their two children - were paramount, however.
We all appropriately worship these elders, who voted with their feet for the city, but who were "built" elsewhere. The thing is - when I look I don't see very much that they were able to pass on. Not that they consciously tried to pass anything on: they were not people to make pronouncements. They were circumspect. I do see that the divorce rate among their six grandchildren is favorable - 5/6 long marriages. They died years before great-grandchildren came along, but there are now 12 greats. Of those 12, though, no prospect yet of great-great-grandchildren, and only one marriage so far. There will be some children eventually, but these young people seem to be following society's trend, in terms of how much of life is or should be "other people than yourself".*
A handful of their descendants are still kinda Baptist or otherwise churchy; one is practically a lay pastor, another couple love to vacation year after year on the beach in Mexico and then go do work on a school they built down there (! - this amazed me because this family inherited a vaguely Appalachian-style xenophobic streak, and she used to be actually alarmed by Mexicans) but in any case following Protestantism on its trajectory of "wokeness" and away from Jesus seems unlikely to yield long-term dividends in the young people's lives. (N.B.: "Social justice" may be more sophisticated in the Yankee Puritan world, but its "turn everything upside down" ethos is just as strong in any Protestant congregation, evangelical or Episcopal, anywhere in the country; where it is rarely not, where the church logo is not yet a Pride emblem, they are just at a stage farther back.)
Everyone is materially well-off, but that's not a strong motivator as it was for these grandparents. It just is - as long as it is. My brother is extremely hardworking, sure, but for the most part, our boats ride on American prosperity, not any herculean effort on anyone's part beyond the genetic competence to take what's available and not screw it up. I think no member of this family has a livelihood that will be passed on to the next generation, which I view as a shame, as I consider that transmission a great source of stability in the world ...
I see a certain continence - most of this group probably drink quite a bit, because it is all people now know how to do socially - while these elders never touched alcohol except possibly in the "great moments" of life - but as far as I know, nobody carrying their DNA uses drugs, perhaps not even marijuana (but I may be willfully naive about the latter).
In short, while acknowledging the pressures and opportunities that led people away from the rural life, I now see the city as lacking in richness, being much closer to an end than a beginning, spiritually, and even intellectually.
*Understand, I don't blame them. Life suddenly seems long now, to partner up when young, and without division of labor as an organizing (and rewarding) principle to aid one through marital difficulties. Not that my grandparents ever disagreed about anything; my mother claims they never spoke a single harsh word to one another, and even to a child they seemed in perfect sympathy. My grandmother in the only expression of uncomposure I ever saw from her, threw herself on his open casket (Baptist!) when they started to close it at the funeral.
“His technical incompetence paralyzes his capacity for insight. As novelist, therefore, he ignores the dynamic economy which he cannot fathom”.
Today, few in STEM society are competent enough to provide much insight to the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence. What happens when nobody has such insight? I suspect we’ll write about it.
Sterling was among a lot of small cities in Illinois that specialized in manufacturing a lot of stuff used on farms -- fence panels, (maybe barbed wire), small cable, nails, nuts, bolts, all the stuff you'd find in a good hardware store in a farming county. It's along a nice small river (Rock River), and is still deeply inside farm country. I haven't been there in 20 years, but I'l bet you could spend a nice weekend there.
I just read Mr. (Merle) Kling's essay. Social scientists have managed to retain power, to the detriment of both science and society. (If economics is counted among the social sciences, I exclude it from that verdict.)
Some possible typos—please forgive me if I'm wrong about any/all:
George Brandes sb Georg?
committing ourselves sb themselves? (my least confident question)
the site of carnage sb sight?
thinking further sb sinking? (I do like "thinking" as a play on words)
“Dramatic political change occurs if and only if it has been preceded by a great deal of violence.“ I was thinking about large scale violence and civil the other day because of Michael Huemer’s recent post, “I Don’t Care About the Issue.” This got me thinking about the origins of violent conflict. I began thinking about America’s worst conflict; how invested the South was in slavery. They were stakeholders in that institution and didn’t want it abolished. I admit that this is not a sufficiently complete explanation of the cause of the war, but it is a significant one, particularly the Fugitive Slave Acts.
In the future, from where might we expect civil unrest to come? I would think we should look toward the existing stakeholders of governmentalized sectors of the economy: medical care, education, housing, defense, law, money and banking.
In my opinion I would say that Trump is the better candidate to alleviate governmentalization of these sectors via nominations to the Judicial Branch. Harris represents the status quo.
“ ..the problem of loss of status among people who were no longer valued in a modern economy. Had he lived to see the recent trends in angry social justice activism, he would not have been surprised that non-STEM academic types are at the forefront..”
There are plenty of people, particularly in the middle of the U.S. at the forefront of feeling no longer valued.
I am so glad to see this piece which does the good deed - if not deliberately- of making this correlation, perhaps using aphorisms that seem so out of fashion, that they now appear back in fashion (or was it, “so in fashion, that they now seem out of fashion”?). Thank you.
Fine Aphorisms, but when it comes to communism, I claim the #1 Iron Law fails. Because communism fails and, as long as people remain self-interested, it will always fail. Not sometimes, always fail. Never succeed.
What were Merle’s early and late feelings about communism? Many Jewish intellectuals were strongly in favor of it, and that it was not just secular but atheist and anti-Christian.
Very interesting thoughts about symbolic conflicts so as to distract the masses. Saw on X a video claiming TDS and the hate against Trump was mostly a distraction.
"He was predicting that many jobs would be made obsolete by technology, and society would have to find a way to deal with widespread unemployment."
I'd like to read more about this topic. I find it fascinating that so many people believe this. I had the same opinion before we entered the current era of more jobs than workers but this just makes it all the more perplexing.
I have thoughts on how we got here (worker shortage) but I don't know if data (which I don't have and aren't sure where to get) would support me. No doubt tech will continue to make more jobs obsolete but I'm curious if there will come a point where new jobs do not replace them.
The other day I saw something - I can't remember where, maybe Noah Smith's blog - anyway, it was a perfectly serious, nonfacetious remark about the jobs are gonna keep coming and no worries about change, because there's: assisting old people, and there's childcare (full stop) ... This was just tossed off as self-evident. Maybe it is. But I instantly had a picture in my mind of when I've been thrown into an all-male environment, like out in the Permian basin, or among a road crew.
There seems to be a fundamental denial of biological reality at work - I mean, unless we're actually successful at getting rid of men.
I just don’t see an army of beefy guys who are good at doing things with their hands, or maybe they aren’t good with their hands, but they’re good at operating machines and driving, or they are strong, etc. - I don’t see them bathing old people or sitting on tiny chairs handing out snacks to little children.
And I’m not being snarky - those were the choices offered by a mainstream and probably very successful blogger the other day, though I can’t recall which.
Those jobs have been dwindling for 50+ years and will continue to dwindle but I don't see them going away. The least adaptable of those beefy guys have had the hardest time adjusting and that will continue but many have done so. Plenty of work for skilled and even semi-skilled beefy workers.
I shouldn't have even said "beefy". I readily concede I'm a Cassandra to your routine Pangloss. But either way, the success of this experiment must be a point of utter disagreement for us, like we inhabit different worlds. Perhaps we do.
“With his dark view of human nature, he thought this was much better than the alternative of violent conflict.“ I actually don’t find that view dark at all. In my piece this morning “My Perspective on the 2024 Election,” I lead by saying that my top priority is safety and protection of my family. Against violence and war. Again, I’m grateful for the beetles that might distract us from violent conflict.
But to be honest, I don’t know if they distract us from violent conflict. I feel like Robert Higgs might shoot me for saying this, but I’m not certain if war comes more from the private sphere or from government. Thoughts on this?
I've always assumed, if you mean anything like a revolution, successful or not, it comes from the government.
Mostly because those who benefit the most from government activity (in a financial/power sense) are 1) not paying real attention to the needs of the 'governed', 2) have largely separated themselves and their lives from the lives of the governed, 3) no longer care about the lives of the governed nor the plight of the individual governed, and 4) are yoyally accustomed to "fixing" any problem by using government force. So, they ingore major probems then attempt to keep what they want in place through the use of force. Like an overheated boiler (not that the analogy would make any sense to them) eventually the pressure is toom much and an explosion occurs.
A manafter my heart. I played a lot of corkball in a small town about 60 miles north of St. Louis.
He sounds like my father. And a colleague once asked me, "Aren't you afraid your students will become as cynicalas yyou are?" To which I repied, "No. For one thing I don't think it would hurt them any more than it has hurt me. And, two, I really don't think it's possible."
My fundamental operating is that humans are no damn good, AND they're untrustorthy.
I greatly enjoyed "What’s the difference between a lady and a diplomat?" though obviously it is totally
inappropriate today. Which is one reason we have so little humor today: the fear of being inapptropriate.
More than inappropriate, it might be unintelligible today. There isn't much social stricture against a lady saying yes anymore.
He would say that “As Marx put it, capitalism saved people from the idiocy of rural life.”
Having grown up in a small town, I was disappointed when my grandmother—a fan of Reagan and Hollywood—told me something similar. We were sitting in the car in my mother’s garage in San Fernando Valley. I was in 6th grade. She said, “City life is better.” I disagreed with her, but of course could not persuade her. She grew up in Sterling, Illinois; me in South Lake Tahoe, California.
To counter these claims I would cite Merle Kling’s First Iron Law: Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.
I know Stering, IL. Not sure it was every a bustling metropois. ;-)
I think her new life in Los Angeles was great for a while. Would have been like revelation to her. For me in 1986 it was a mess largely because of public school bussing. I probably would have preferred Sterling.
Actually, I quite liked Sterling. It was at the time I knew it best a very mixed Midwestern economy. Perhap it didn't bustle, but it wasn't down and out, either. Lots of farmers or workers who would have had jobs on the farms migrated to Sterling beginning in at least the early 1960s. They had good, middle-class lives. I'm not sure about lawns.
A departed colleague was once their city manager, and he siad that in the late 1970s-1980s it was a great place to live. Of course, it became at least partly a Rust Belt city after that.
Good to know. I’ll have to check it out someday.
Excellent. Someday we should get up a cork ball game if we can find a couple other players.
> Rural v. city
My maternal grandparents were salt of the earth people. Baptists. My grandmother was one of nine, growing up on her family farm; her father's cannery label still shows up in re Americana decor. My grandfather came from harder sharecropper-type circumstances, with early deaths leaving him to fend for himself. As a very young man he became a stringer of the phone lines going up across middle America. When the Depression was over the two of them moved to the city, never again living a rural life, the only remnants being an effort to grow tomatoes in the poor dirt of a city yard, and his strong mechanical ability compelling him to fix anything broken and to "make-do" DIY stuff, as country people do. Kids nearly grown, she became a schoolteacher.
So: they were just part of a great migration, like others at this period.
It was a great, great thing when they were able to buy a Cadillac late in life. It was a great purchase when they bought their upholstered "living room suite" (which I think we pronounced "suit") and the zippered plastic cover that protected it. It was a great thing when their daughter was to be married, and they laid out friends' gifts on tables set up for the purpose so that the friends could come by and see their gifts among the other gifts, because - what "beautiful and useful things", for which we are grateful. [Kinda like Pampered Chef parties I used to be invited to, only no one was trying to sell anyone anything lol.] Contra Paul Fussell, I don't think the covers were a damning class marker; or perhaps they were, but nonetheless my grandmother was very much a lady, far more ladylike than I would ever be, and it was less about class, perhaps, than living through the Depression, with no fixed abode, following the phone lines, returning to the family farm to give birth - so that possessions had real value for them. They didn't do restaurants (except on Sunday, after church) or theater or movies or other such urban delights, but enjoyed their church and their social life, bowling for him and bridge for her, Shriners and Bluebirds and more such organizations. Family - the families of their two children - were paramount, however.
We all appropriately worship these elders, who voted with their feet for the city, but who were "built" elsewhere. The thing is - when I look I don't see very much that they were able to pass on. Not that they consciously tried to pass anything on: they were not people to make pronouncements. They were circumspect. I do see that the divorce rate among their six grandchildren is favorable - 5/6 long marriages. They died years before great-grandchildren came along, but there are now 12 greats. Of those 12, though, no prospect yet of great-great-grandchildren, and only one marriage so far. There will be some children eventually, but these young people seem to be following society's trend, in terms of how much of life is or should be "other people than yourself".*
A handful of their descendants are still kinda Baptist or otherwise churchy; one is practically a lay pastor, another couple love to vacation year after year on the beach in Mexico and then go do work on a school they built down there (! - this amazed me because this family inherited a vaguely Appalachian-style xenophobic streak, and she used to be actually alarmed by Mexicans) but in any case following Protestantism on its trajectory of "wokeness" and away from Jesus seems unlikely to yield long-term dividends in the young people's lives. (N.B.: "Social justice" may be more sophisticated in the Yankee Puritan world, but its "turn everything upside down" ethos is just as strong in any Protestant congregation, evangelical or Episcopal, anywhere in the country; where it is rarely not, where the church logo is not yet a Pride emblem, they are just at a stage farther back.)
Everyone is materially well-off, but that's not a strong motivator as it was for these grandparents. It just is - as long as it is. My brother is extremely hardworking, sure, but for the most part, our boats ride on American prosperity, not any herculean effort on anyone's part beyond the genetic competence to take what's available and not screw it up. I think no member of this family has a livelihood that will be passed on to the next generation, which I view as a shame, as I consider that transmission a great source of stability in the world ...
I see a certain continence - most of this group probably drink quite a bit, because it is all people now know how to do socially - while these elders never touched alcohol except possibly in the "great moments" of life - but as far as I know, nobody carrying their DNA uses drugs, perhaps not even marijuana (but I may be willfully naive about the latter).
In short, while acknowledging the pressures and opportunities that led people away from the rural life, I now see the city as lacking in richness, being much closer to an end than a beginning, spiritually, and even intellectually.
*Understand, I don't blame them. Life suddenly seems long now, to partner up when young, and without division of labor as an organizing (and rewarding) principle to aid one through marital difficulties. Not that my grandparents ever disagreed about anything; my mother claims they never spoke a single harsh word to one another, and even to a child they seemed in perfect sympathy. My grandmother in the only expression of uncomposure I ever saw from her, threw herself on his open casket (Baptist!) when they started to close it at the funeral.
Fascinating account.
Symbolic politics is where we are at
“His technical incompetence paralyzes his capacity for insight. As novelist, therefore, he ignores the dynamic economy which he cannot fathom”.
Today, few in STEM society are competent enough to provide much insight to the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence. What happens when nobody has such insight? I suspect we’ll write about it.
Sterling was among a lot of small cities in Illinois that specialized in manufacturing a lot of stuff used on farms -- fence panels, (maybe barbed wire), small cable, nails, nuts, bolts, all the stuff you'd find in a good hardware store in a farming county. It's along a nice small river (Rock River), and is still deeply inside farm country. I haven't been there in 20 years, but I'l bet you could spend a nice weekend there.
This was wonderful, Arnold. Full of gems!
I just read Mr. (Merle) Kling's essay. Social scientists have managed to retain power, to the detriment of both science and society. (If economics is counted among the social sciences, I exclude it from that verdict.)
Some possible typos—please forgive me if I'm wrong about any/all:
George Brandes sb Georg?
committing ourselves sb themselves? (my least confident question)
the site of carnage sb sight?
thinking further sb sinking? (I do like "thinking" as a play on words)
The serve on sb They?
creativeity sb creativity?
“Dramatic political change occurs if and only if it has been preceded by a great deal of violence.“ I was thinking about large scale violence and civil the other day because of Michael Huemer’s recent post, “I Don’t Care About the Issue.” This got me thinking about the origins of violent conflict. I began thinking about America’s worst conflict; how invested the South was in slavery. They were stakeholders in that institution and didn’t want it abolished. I admit that this is not a sufficiently complete explanation of the cause of the war, but it is a significant one, particularly the Fugitive Slave Acts.
In the future, from where might we expect civil unrest to come? I would think we should look toward the existing stakeholders of governmentalized sectors of the economy: medical care, education, housing, defense, law, money and banking.
In my opinion I would say that Trump is the better candidate to alleviate governmentalization of these sectors via nominations to the Judicial Branch. Harris represents the status quo.
“then this proves that the paragraph actually says nothing.” Hahaha
“ ..the problem of loss of status among people who were no longer valued in a modern economy. Had he lived to see the recent trends in angry social justice activism, he would not have been surprised that non-STEM academic types are at the forefront..”
There are plenty of people, particularly in the middle of the U.S. at the forefront of feeling no longer valued.
I am so glad to see this piece which does the good deed - if not deliberately- of making this correlation, perhaps using aphorisms that seem so out of fashion, that they now appear back in fashion (or was it, “so in fashion, that they now seem out of fashion”?). Thank you.
And thank you for quoting that paragraph. I misread it the first time or otherwise missed its point.
Fine Aphorisms, but when it comes to communism, I claim the #1 Iron Law fails. Because communism fails and, as long as people remain self-interested, it will always fail. Not sometimes, always fail. Never succeed.
What were Merle’s early and late feelings about communism? Many Jewish intellectuals were strongly in favor of it, and that it was not just secular but atheist and anti-Christian.
Very interesting thoughts about symbolic conflicts so as to distract the masses. Saw on X a video claiming TDS and the hate against Trump was mostly a distraction.
He was never taken in by Communism. Too much of a realist
"He was predicting that many jobs would be made obsolete by technology, and society would have to find a way to deal with widespread unemployment."
I'd like to read more about this topic. I find it fascinating that so many people believe this. I had the same opinion before we entered the current era of more jobs than workers but this just makes it all the more perplexing.
I have thoughts on how we got here (worker shortage) but I don't know if data (which I don't have and aren't sure where to get) would support me. No doubt tech will continue to make more jobs obsolete but I'm curious if there will come a point where new jobs do not replace them.
The other day I saw something - I can't remember where, maybe Noah Smith's blog - anyway, it was a perfectly serious, nonfacetious remark about the jobs are gonna keep coming and no worries about change, because there's: assisting old people, and there's childcare (full stop) ... This was just tossed off as self-evident. Maybe it is. But I instantly had a picture in my mind of when I've been thrown into an all-male environment, like out in the Permian basin, or among a road crew.
There seems to be a fundamental denial of biological reality at work - I mean, unless we're actually successful at getting rid of men.
I don't follow. I have one guess but it doesn't seem like a good one.
I just don’t see an army of beefy guys who are good at doing things with their hands, or maybe they aren’t good with their hands, but they’re good at operating machines and driving, or they are strong, etc. - I don’t see them bathing old people or sitting on tiny chairs handing out snacks to little children.
And I’m not being snarky - those were the choices offered by a mainstream and probably very successful blogger the other day, though I can’t recall which.
Those jobs have been dwindling for 50+ years and will continue to dwindle but I don't see them going away. The least adaptable of those beefy guys have had the hardest time adjusting and that will continue but many have done so. Plenty of work for skilled and even semi-skilled beefy workers.
I shouldn't have even said "beefy". I readily concede I'm a Cassandra to your routine Pangloss. But either way, the success of this experiment must be a point of utter disagreement for us, like we inhabit different worlds. Perhaps we do.
Beefy, macho or not the daycare provider type. All close enough to a type with less jobs tailored to their perceived preferences.
I don't see you as Cassandra nor me pangloss. Far from it.
“With his dark view of human nature, he thought this was much better than the alternative of violent conflict.“ I actually don’t find that view dark at all. In my piece this morning “My Perspective on the 2024 Election,” I lead by saying that my top priority is safety and protection of my family. Against violence and war. Again, I’m grateful for the beetles that might distract us from violent conflict.
But to be honest, I don’t know if they distract us from violent conflict. I feel like Robert Higgs might shoot me for saying this, but I’m not certain if war comes more from the private sphere or from government. Thoughts on this?
I've always assumed, if you mean anything like a revolution, successful or not, it comes from the government.
Mostly because those who benefit the most from government activity (in a financial/power sense) are 1) not paying real attention to the needs of the 'governed', 2) have largely separated themselves and their lives from the lives of the governed, 3) no longer care about the lives of the governed nor the plight of the individual governed, and 4) are yoyally accustomed to "fixing" any problem by using government force. So, they ingore major probems then attempt to keep what they want in place through the use of force. Like an overheated boiler (not that the analogy would make any sense to them) eventually the pressure is toom much and an explosion occurs.