Vaclav Havel, from Heřmanice prison, June 26, 1982:

Dear Olga,

You may remember how upset I was that earthlings left such a mess on the moon, like a bunch of city people on a Sunday evening littering the banks of a pond with refuse from their sausages and mustard. Everything that was too heavy and no longer necessary the astronauts simply left scattered around the landing module; and in addition there is all manner of scrap metal strewn about on the moon (the now inactive Lunachod, rockets that have made hard or soft landings, etc.). Millions of years after our civilization has ceased to exist and its last traces on earth have turned to dust, the junkyard we have left behind us will remain unchanged on the moon, a sad monument to our advanced civilization. This distresses me not just because I’m essentially a tidy person; the reasons go far deeper: there is in it a rather melancholy symbol. I mention this because my meditations are edging toward—among other things—an analysis of the situation that this symbol illustrates.

(Heřmanice was a labor prison in Ostrava, northern Moravia, where Havel served over 3 1/2 years welding and acetylene torch cutting before being shifted to laundry and scrap metal as his health deteriorated, which eventually led to his release after spiking a serious fever in January 1983.)

“The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine” — Ross Bullen in The Public Domain Review:

In addition to the gendered dimension of neurasthenia (the majority of those diagnosed were women), it was also seen as a particularly American disease, with some ever referring to the ailment as “Americanitis”. [George Miller] Beard was among those interested in the national character of neurasthenia, a concept he explored in his book American Nervousness (1881). “The greater prevalence of nervousness in America”, he writes, “is a complex resultant of a number of influences, the chief of which are the dryness of the air, extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious liberty, and the great mental activity made necessary and possible in a new and productive country under such climactic conditions.” Despite this capacious description of what it is that makes Americans nervous, Beard emphatically states that the Jumping Frenchmen do not qualify. While sufferers of neurasthenia appear tired and enervated, the lumberjacks of Moosehead Lake are “among the best examples of physical hardness and endurance”. Beard makes a distinction between “nervousness” and “unbalanced mental organization”, aligning the jumpers squarely with the latter category. The closest analogue Beard can find for the Jumping Frenchmen are “Middle Age epidemics”, like the so-called dancing plagues that periodically occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and early modern period. The victims of these epidemics had “but little intellectual strength and very much emotion”, a description that he implicitly associates with the Jumping Frenchmen as well. For Beard, the Jumping Frenchmen cannot suffer from modern American nervousness because — as Canadians, as francophones, and as rural laborers — they are not really modern Americans. Rather, they are “precious curiosities, relics or antiques that the fourteenth century has, as it were, dropped right into the middle of the nineteenth.” […]

… Beard finds an analogue for the jumpers in the hysterical epidemics of the Middle Ages, but also with the “Holy Rollers” of various religious revivals, who would roll on the ground in a state of uncontrollable religious ecstasy. While throwing a pipe or hitting your friend might seem very different from communing with the Holy Spirit, Beard sees them as deeply related, if distinct, forms of human behavior.

… While other forms of psychic or mass hysteria can last hours or days, the action of the jumpers is both immediate and short lived. “The explosion of the Jumper, like the explosion of a revolver, is sudden and instantaneous”, Beard writes. “If we look at a Jumper five seconds after he has been jumped, we see no indication of what he has just done.” The second key difference is “the persistence and permanence of the liability to be excited”. People tend to move on from other forms of psychic hysteria. Once the medieval peasants stop dancing, or the Holy Rollers stop rolling, they return to their regular lives. Not so the Jumping Frenchmen, for whom jumping is a lifelong condition. Beard considers that jumping may be hereditary — he notes that many of the jumpers he met belong to the same extended family. He also speculates that jumping may have been “an evolution of tickling”, noting that many jumpers are ticklish, and that jumpers deliberately prank one another “in lieu of most other sources of amusement”. But ultimately Beard concludes that “[e]verything about this subject is incredible.”

Also, an early line in the essay worth quoting:

After running through a list of symptoms typically associated with the Jumping Frenchmen — throwing, striking, jumping — Beard speculates that the jumpers may be “an extreme illustration of what we all are — that is, they possessed far less inhibitory power than we all possessed.

Daniel A. Cox:

One of the things that we were doing in all the groups that we talked to, we were talking to young single men and young single women, and we would try to get a sense of what their formative experiences were like. What were your parents telling you? … What did your parents emphasize when you were growing up? Did you hear about the importance of getting college education and the importance of being financially stable? A lot of what we heard from folks was like, yeah, their parents were emphasizing this. We had asked for a show of hands, whether it was the men’s groups or women’s groups, everyone was saying, yes, my parents were talking to me about this.

We’re like, okay, well, what about marriage? How many of you are hearing your parents talk about the importance of finding a long-term partner and getting married? And not one person raised their hand in any of these focus groups that their parents talked about this. We asked about the importance of parenthood. How many of your parents were stressing that this really matters, this is important? And again, no one raised their hands.

A couple of the women said that their grandparents had mentioned this, but their parents had not. And in a national representative survey, we took the same question and we got basically the same results: that among this generation, Generation Z, they’re far less likely to have heard about the importance and what it means to live a good life includes being a parent or getting married. It was much more about individual accomplishments and professional achievements, academic achievements. That is what folks are learning.

Frederick Buechner, in a letter to his newborn grandson to be opened on his 21st birthday:

Even if my grandfathers had been less shadowy and I had been less timid, I wonder if I would ever have been able to learn from them what I would give so much to know now about who they were, both for its own sake and also for the sake of learning something more about who I am myself. Even if I were to stretch this letter out, God forbid, to a thousand pages, would I ever be able to convey my full story to you? I suspect the answer is no. I suspect that our stories in their fullness will always be hidden from each other and that all those whiskered old men and bonneted old women looking out at us from their photographs in the family album will always remain mysteries to us even if, like me, they happen to have written their memoirs. And yet I believe that all is not lost. Maybe we can never know each other’s stories in their fullness, but I believe we can know them in their depth for the reason that in their depth we all have the same story.

Whether we’re rich or poor, male or female, a nineteenth-century Swiss jeweler like Isaac Golay in his oversized frock coat, or a twentieth-century American clergyman like me with a penchant for writing books, or a young squirt celebrating his twenty-first birthday in the twenty-first century like you, our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live.

When supermarket eggs were getting expensive a while back, a local farmer’s market vendor said she was raising the price of her eggs. Not because her input costs were increasing—they hadn’t, she said–but simply because the supermarket price had gone up. To paraphrase from memory, “It’s not right that I should not get paid just as much for my eggs, since they are a superior product.”

Nice timing from my friend Jeremy in his post on “luxury localism.” The first thing it reminded me of was the way that luxury localism has basically always been with us. Whole Foods (and Fresh Fields before them) was always a business model that hopes to eat other businesses for lunch. It lost no soul in its its acquisition by Amazon — that was pure destiny, baby. The target demagogic were the “eco-affluent” playactors who longed for “simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence,” to use Dougald Hine’s description. (I owe the discovery of Hine to Jeremy as well.) 

But it’s great timing because I was just chatting about this over the weekend. Post furniture moving on Saturday, I was shooting the shit with a couple guys and complaining about lamenting the seldom articulated difference between a free market that sets appropriate prices (what we think the market does) and one that basically asks “What’s the highest price I can get away with?” (what the market actually does).*

“Unconstrained maximization” to use a phrase from MacIntyre that I was just reading today, which is another reason it’s great timing. In fact MacIntyre, speaking of the unnecessary and harmful dichotomy between relationships of mutual advantage and relationships of sympathetic affection, gives a great example of this:

Affective and sympathetic ties are always more than a matter of affection and sympathy. And in a similar way relationships of rational exchange, governed by norms to which it is to the advantage of each participant to adhere, are also embedded in and sustained by relationships governed by norms of uncalculated and unpredicted giving and receiving. So it is with those institutionalized relationships that make possible the exchanges of markets.

It is indeed true that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations I, ii). And just as butcher, brewer, and baker generally act with regard to their own interest, so too do their customers. But if, on entering the butcher’s shop as an habitual customer I find him collapsing from a heart attack, and I merely remark ‘Ah! Not in a position to sell me my meat to-day, I see,’ and proceed immediately to his competitor’s store to complete my purchase, I will have obviously and grossly damaged my whole relationship to him, including my economic relationship, although I will have done nothing contrary to the norms of the market. Less obviously and less grossly, even if I respond to his condition only by satisfying those minimum requirements that will enable me to rebut quasilegal accusations of irresponsibility—I call an ambulance and the moment the medical technicians arrive I leave—I will still have undermined my relationship to him and his, by my avoidance of my larger responsibility. Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local nonmarket relationship, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they so often in fact do, undermine and corrupt communal ties.

Norms of giving and receiving are then to some large degree presupposed both by our affective ties and by our market relationships. Detach them from this background presupposition in social practice and each becomes a source of vice…

Going back to that Ian Marcus Corbin interview, there was a moment when he was describing something similar, and similarly hilariously tragic. “If you had a tribe where a small number of the people in the tribe were getting phenomenally personally wealthy by doing harm to the other people in the tribe,” Corbin say, “you would go whack those guys over the head with a club.”

Earlier in the interview he says

And I think it leads to the kind of baffling levels of hoarding and indifference that we see in a society like America right now.

Black Elk, who I mentioned before, he visited New York City in the late 19th century and he wass like, What is this? This is insane. He’s like, You have people who have more than they could ever use in their whole lives and other people who are starving, and they’re just near each other, and they’re not giving it to the people who need it. This is bananas. And you have other European observers being like, Whoa, this is so weird. Money means way too much. What’s going on?

What’s goin on is that we’ve isolated a market relationship, called it one of “mutual advantage,” and asked it the one, simple question: What is the most I/we/it can get away with? And we call the answer “fair market value.” And if asked to think further, about justice or righteousness or virtue, we shrug. What business is that of the Free Market’s? What are you, a Marxist?

____

*Better: What’s the most I can get away with?, or, What’s the least I can get away with? depending on circumstances. What it doesn’t ask is, What is the right thing to do? What price and what practice is best for this or that community? Amazon is the American dream in both directions. The seller owner gets to make billions; the participants of mutual exchange consumers get to spend less and be more lazy relax more, all while getting the privilege of being good happy little consumers, too. Win, win, win, win. But the love of money, by any other name, is still the root of all evil. 

Also, there’s a question that was raised about whether the seller of eggs in Jeremy’s post is even managing to make a profit at all. I can’t answer that. But I think Jeremy’s post stands regardless and I think he rightly laments what he observed. I can have a solid appreciation for the role of money or the market and still remember that money is, to use another, older MacIntyrean phrase, the ultimate “‘good’ external to any practice.” The perpetual struggle to make eggs answer to money-market forces may just be a great reminder of that incompatibility that we swim in so regularly. A lot of our eggs come from a neighbor down the street — as a gift. A lot of my family’s eggs come from my grandmother or my sister — as a gift. Eggs being given and received as a gift of shared neighborliness — that is a good internal to a practice, and it has no incompatibility to speak of. 

Meanwhile, the World Petroleum Congress—a nearly century-old gathering of energy ministers and oil executives that organizers expected to draw more than 25,000 people—opened in Riyadh on Sunday. Organizers had reassured investors that the kingdom’s major conferences would go ahead as planned, but the chief executives of ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Shell, and BP withdrew. The kingdom, which has poured money from its nearly $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund into an effort to become a global business hub, is also slated to host its flagship investment conference, the 10th annual Future Investment Initiative, on October 26-29, and in January, Saudi Arabia will welcome the AFC Asian Cup, hoping to draw hundreds of thousands of soccer fans.

As usual, Jeffrey Foucault brings some of the best that words can do in his latest newsletter:

You can make Tuscan Chops without fresh sage leaves but you should not. As a river without fish is only water running downhill, the Chops without fresh sage are only pork chops fried with garlic.

But to walk out in the first brisk dusk, a jazz record carrying thinly through the screen door, the grass cold under your bare feet, and to snip the broad, living leaves of sage from the garden, stacking them in your palm like pages of summer, their trichomes standing up in soft and minutely patterned resinous velvet, redolent of so many good things — Artemisia Ludoviciana, the prairie sage you have crinkled into the patch pocket of your snap shirt on rivers across the Mountain West; the pine forests of Northern Wisconsin that you wandered as a boy; the tightly coiled smudge you buy on the road every winter at the little country store in Tesuque, NM, and bring home to consecrate dark mornings by the wood stove — and then to bring the leaves in and toss them into a hot skillet with olive oil and a little butter until they become crisply translucent, small panes of stained glass scattered over a well turned pork chop, with rice and a simple pan sauce. Well, there is grace itself.

We dropped the kid off at college, came home and wept. In the morning we hiked up our pants and started after our work, having our coffee together and convening again in the evenings to make the ritual of supper, and remember the antediluvian pattern of life.

We must have found the recipe in a magazine not long after I moved out here, twenty-odd years ago. But we haven’t looked at it in years, and we’ve deconstructed and elaborated upon whatever it was. The recipe is elementary and like so many of the best, depends more on grammar — time, temperature, order of operations — than on wizardry. The best food is peasant food, older than the Bible, and more forgiving.

A quick note I want to add, a little apropos of yesterday’s post. Something else from Frederick Buechner that I was reading last night, from his essay “The Longing for Home”:

The word longing comes from the same route as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space, and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to, and that belongs to us.

Earlier in the essay Buechner asks, “Are the words true home perhaps too much to apply to even the happiest home that lies within our power to create? Are they words that always point to a reality beyond themselves?”

I’m not thinking at the moment that I’m doing it justice, and maybe it’s just that I can’t hear the word antediluvian and not hear it in an eschatological and promissory way alongside its ancient, primitive ring.

Anyway, this is a reminder that — I don’t know how, I don’t know when (and I don’t know where I put my notes) — but I really want to get to Part II of that “radical anticipation” post.

Noah Smith:

Social media feeds — Twitter and the Facebook wall — turned American society into a sort of digital hive mind. Feeling yourself being absorbed into that great unified consciousness could be an agonizing experience — mobs constantly punished any deviation from conformity, quirky unique subcultures were devoured and metabolized, everyone was forced into a cell with people they had spent their lives trying to escape. The hunt for virality was everything. Viral memes were the thoughts that drifted through the mind of the social media Borg.

There are almost no memes left. For so many years there was a steady drumbeat of images and phrases that people passed around among each other ad infinitum; now, I can’t even think of the last one that really made the rounds. Twitter — now X — has not died but is diminished in scope and relevance. At times it feels like a ghost town.

Where did everybody go? I would like to think that they’re offline, living as we lived in the Before Times, running through sunlit fields blasting each other with Super Soakers or playing Dungeons and Dragons in their living rooms. Or perhaps they’re in Signal and WhatsApp chats and Discord channels, talking with their friends in the comfort and safety of privacy. I would like to think that they rejected the digital hive mind for the ancient ways of individuality and Dunbar’s Number.

But my bet is that they’re just watching short form video. Over the last few years, the entire internet has steadily carcinized into a single type of app/website/media/entertainment — a vertically scrolling feed full of short video clips. Vine invented it, TikTok popularized it, and now every other site has copied this one dominant, all-conquering format. Already, vertical short-form video feeds are more dominant than every form of media except for social media itself. 

But even this significantly understates the change. The term “social media” used to mean people writing things to each other or sending images on Facebook or Twitter; now, it’s mostly used to mean people watching videos. 

Ian Marcus Corbin:

I think for a lot of kids these days, the idea of having like really deep, rock solid values and beliefs that you would die for sounds preposterous. And I think part of it is that a lot of them live their lives in these constant three, four, five, ten second clips, right? And you get one point of view, you get one lifestyle, you get one takedown after another, after another, after another, into the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. And it really makes it difficult to formulate a solid, flexible, stable sense of yourself and of what is good in the world and how you ought to be in it.

[…]

If you get involved enough that you can understand one meme and then understand the subsequent three memes that are all responding to each other — it’s brilliant, there is a lot of intelligence being deployed. It’s hilarious and there’s a lot of ingenuity and creativity — but in this kind of nihilistic vacuum where nothing, none of it actually matters. It’s just, I’m seeing something you missed and I’m pointing out something ironic or funny that no one else has pointed out yet. And the fact that this is happening to adolescents in particular is a very strange thing.

So there’s another quote by Eliot that I begin the book with. He writes, “Home is where one starts from. We grow older / the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.” My read of that is that the work of child rearing through this incredibly extended process that is really unique to us as our kind of animal is that by the time you are an adult, by the time you kind of cross that threshold, you do have a sense of of being at home in the world, knowing who you are, knowing what your tasks are, knowing what is roughly good and evil.

As Eliot says, then life goes on and you have to bear the burdens of an adult and you have to see things you wish you didn’t have to see and go through things you wish you didn’t have to go through. And that kind of groundedness becomes unsettled, right? And maybe by midlife or before, you’re like, OK, what am I doing? Who am I really? And what is worth pursuing? … It’s a life-long thing to see all that and take all that in and confront the death of people you love and your own impending death. And then at the end to be able to say, OK, I understand this. Here I am. But that’s premised on this kind of, not traditional, but archetypal departure from home and then return to home.

But I don’t know what it looks like if we become unable to give young people a sense of who they are to begin with. … I don’t envy it. And I want to tell my kids, and my students as well, just acknowledge that this is an odd moment. This is a very strange moment to be coming of age.

I meant to add to the last post…

*I’m reminded of a line from Marilynne Robinson’s Genesis:

Jesus is attentive to the matter of debt. It figures often in his parables. He teaches his disciples to say, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” To some traditions, and to the translators of the King James Version, his language must have seemed unpoetical or inexact, and they have supplied sin or trespass in place of this blunt word, which, in context, might imply that we should, ahem, forgive our debtors. Trespass is an ancient term in European property law. It need not imply that any harm is done as ordinarily defined, only that there has been an undesired intrusion of some kind. Whether this is an appropriate metaphor here—those without property rights cannot be intruded upon, which certainly does not mean they cannot be injured—I leave to others. Sin is anodyne. The word in the version in the Gospel of Matthew 6:12 is the Greek word meaning “debt,” which is the word that also appears in the parables of Jesus where debt figures. The difference is significant. To forgive a trespasser might cost nothing. The law of Moses gives the poor and strangers access to fields and vineyards and the right to gather food in them, so the legal protections of property that lie behind trespass as a concept are biblically dubious. On the other hand, to forgive a debt means first of all to abandon the expectation of repayment of money or goods, at a cost that could be substantial. This sounds more like Jesus.