Antonia Malchik

A long time ago I had a high school history and government teacher who probably forever changed the way I think about the power of identity, especially group identity, in affecting human behavior. In my senior year of high school, in the early 1990s, he taught a section on Nazi propaganda that I’m sure these days would be posted to social media in a hot minute, for good or ill; I’ve begun to wonder recently if on some level he hoped through this course to inoculate his students against the kind of groupthink that characterizes movements like Nazism.

In addition to having us watch and analyze Nazi propaganda videos to learn about a) the power of dehumanization along with b) the lure of group identity and belonging, one of the books he assigned to us was Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer.

Hoffer, for those who haven’t heard of him, was a lot of things. Born, he said, in 1902 in the Bronx to German immigrants who died young, he worked as a migrant farm laborer and spent time on Los Angeles’s Skid Row before ending up working as a longshoreman after being rejected from Army enlistment in 1940 due to a hernia.

All of this information comes from Hoffer himself, and there remain some interesting questions bordering on controversy about how much of his early life is true and what he might have fabricated.

He definitely did write ten books, however, and spent a few years as an adjunct professor at Berkeley. The True Believer became a bestseller after President Dwight D. Eisenhower mentioned it in a press conference and it remains Hoffer’s most well-known and widely read book.

The True Believer has cropped up here and there over the past several years in mass media mentions of seemingly inexplicable or out-of-nowhere mass movements and political forces. One of the intriguing things about the book is that, like the main character in the TV show Ted Lasso appealing equally to hardline political conservatives and progressives, each thinking “the other side” isn’t in on the jokes or messaging, one’s interpretation of who constitutes a “true believer” can be bent according to one’s perspective or ideology. But no matter how readily its characterizations are construed to serve any political interpretation, the main messages regarding the appeal of mass movements remain the same. They’re lessons that have vaguely stuck with me for nearly 30 years. 

Mass movements are more, and less, than what we think they are. Fostered and promoted by what Hoffer calls “men of words” (Tucker Carlson immediately came to mind—Hoffer’s “men of words” are people who prime the populace for radical change through language, but who are not leaders of change themselves [Bernie Sanders might be a crossover between the two]), these movements rely on charismatic leaders with little need for truth or integrity, but who have, among other qualities:

“. . . audacity and joy in defiance; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; . . .”

along with

“a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants. . . . The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men.”

All of which sounds awfully familiar.

Mass movements, when presented with the right kind of leader, catch fire with a populace that is bored and somewhat self-disgusted, possibly angry but not completely downtrodden. Pointing to examples like the French Revolution, Hoffer posits that mass movements are far more likely to occur when people have seen small improvements in their life conditions than when they have very little and expectations of less. These movements also rely heavily on “inventing memories of past greatness” to persuade true believers that the present is a miserable state of existence. The movement must then go beyond the mirage to “make a misery of the present” in order to keep followers fixed on a prize that is always just a little out of reach.

To get there, though, mass movements need to rely on unifying forces and unifying messages. Hatred is the obvious choice, “the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents.”  

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

There is nothing so easy as shared hatred unless it is shared contempt.

Hoffer has a lot to say on the subject of hatred. Reading his assessment struck me in particular because I recently had conversations relating to our state’s most recent legislative session in which the characterization “mean” was mentioned more than once. Never, I’ve heard both privately and publicly, have people seen a group of lawmakers so bent on cruelty, so eager to use their power to punish those they deem an enemy, or just plain abhorrent. Never so desirous of finding an outlet for an emotion that gets as close to hatred as you can without saying it out loud.

Yet where, Hoffer asks, does this hatred come from? My own thoughts had landed on a general fear of and resistance to change, but Hoffer’s ideas are perhaps ahead of his time, a kind of gut-thrust into the human psyche:

“They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt, and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others—and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch. . . . Even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice.”

The unifying force of the mass movement, then, realizes itself eventually in its vilification of the present, mirages of past and future greatness, shared hatred of a manufactured enemy, and, finally, a leader’s ability to control the movement, its members, and its loyalties.

A few years ago a leader in my state’s legislature published an editorial complaining about members of what at the time was called the Common Sense Caucus—a group of a particular party, say Party A, of legislators willing to vote with the other party, Party B, over what they saw as common sense legislation that benefited Montanans. I wish I could remember what the exact wording of the letter was, but it boiled down to the idea that Party A members were not doing their job unless they voted in lockstep with the nationwide Party A’s priorities. Nevermind what legislators’ local constituents wanted of them; what mattered was following the Party line.*

The merging of individual identity with Party identity—and a subsequent leader’s control over that group identity—is an early characteristic of mass movements: 

“Stalin succeeded in turning proud and brave men into cringing cowards by depriving them of any possibility of identification with the party they had served all their lives and with the Russian masses. These old Bolsheviks had long ago cut themselves off from humanity outside Russia. . . . There was for them neither past nor future, neither memory nor glory outside the confines of holy Russia and the Communist party—and both these were now wholly and irrevocably in Stalin’s hands.” (Emphasis added.)

The submersion of an individual’s identity into the mass, into a group identity, is the main thrust of Hoffer’s thesis. He repeatedly makes the point that people do not turn to mass movements because they are inspired or because they are stupid, but because they are both bored and searching for a way to exist that allows them to escape an unsatisfactory or unfulfilling “self”—to escape themselves. The particular ideology doesn’t matter much—Hoffer points out that there was plenty of ship-jumping between Nazism and communism during World War II, a common theme among adherents to hardline or extremist ideologies that is no less true today. It’s not the movement itself but the sense of belonging that matters.

In other words, truly any of us could fall in with a mass movement, an understanding that I believe was the purpose of my high school teacher’s lesson on Nazi propaganda. The attraction of escaping yourself and being part of something bigger, grander, could lure anyone, given the right time of life or right circumstances. Interestingly, Hoffer also makes the repeated but less emphasized point that creative people—fulfilled creative people; Hitler was not alone among Nazi leadership in being a failed, frustrated artist—are less prone to subsume themselves in mass movements. Not because fulfilled creative people are smarter or more successful or wiser, but because they have a way of being secure with themselves and their work that negates the need for finding an outside identity. Sadly, he doesn’t provide a method of cultivating this kind of groundedness among the greater populace.**

Once someone has fallen in with a mass movement, facts cease to become persuasive, if they ever were in the first place. It is the certainty of belief that matters, never reality:

“The effectiveness of doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is. . . . the effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude.”

In an effective mass movement, the true believer’s yearning for identity finds a place, a sense of belonging is fulfilled, and individual responsibility is then taken out of one’s hands. The movement, and its leader, decide what’s right and wrong. All one needs to do is stay with the movement and the whole gnawing issue of what is the point of this life; what am I doing here? is lifted blissfully off of one’s shoulders.

That’s what I got from those long-ago lessons on Nazi propaganda, anyway. The lure is powerful, and belonging and hatred are in fact equally easy if you release your own moral responsibility.

Though the last sections of the book talk a bit about Gandhi and Lincoln and other mass movement leaders who managed to channel the energy of true believers into change for good, The True Believer spends more time on Nazism and Soviet communism (fairly enough, as it was published only a few years after World War II ended) and isn’t what I’d call a hopeful book. I was left feeling that there is little anyone can do to stop a mass movement once it has gathered enough true believers, even if the movement hasn’t yet reached a point of no return. The minds are locked away and there’s little anyone can do but try to survive it.

I really don’t want to live that way, much less think that way.

There are a few things to consider here that make me feel a little less hopeless. One is research I did a couple of years ago for an essay on riots in Aeon magazine. I suspect, though I don’t know for certain, that Hoffer did take some understanding about human nature from late-1800s theories about common people, riots, and the thought that people (commoners, that is) lose their individuality when in a crowd, acting as a destructive mass. More recent scholarship (much of which is in the essay) undermines a lot of this understanding. Even when I asked one of the researchers in Britain about the phenomenon of football hooliganism, he pushed back—alcohol and euphoria are at play there, but also many football riots have been found to have outside actors prodding violence. Where the line is between manufactured violence and “real” violence I don’t know, but much of what we believe about crowd groupthink is both incorrect—this is backed by research going back decades—and seemingly intractable.

So while lacking or despising one’s sense of self, and the unifying force of hatred, certainly ring true as foundation stones for mass movements—the early-1990s genocide in Rwanda comes to mind—I don’t know that the inevitability of them is as certain as the book left me feeling. Maybe that’s just me; maybe it’s part of my belief that we have to change the narratives of what we think humans are capable of in order to change our societies and our future, but I remain persuaded that humanity is capable of more, and better, even if we don’t yet know how.

One of the essays I share and recommend more than just about any other is also from Aeon, on echo chambers and epistemic bubbles by philosophy professor C Thi Nguyen. I keep returning to it because it gives me an in-depth understanding of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers—and the differences between them—but also of what works and what doesn’t in escaping them, or trying to help someone else escape them. “We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed,” wrote Nguyen. “But echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.”

“Does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber. . . . Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily, too. Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things. Their belief systems provide structural integrity, resilience and active responses to outside attacks.”

These needn’t be purely socio-political-religious phenomena. It’s helpful that Nguyen uses Crossfit exercise devotees and adherents to the Paleo diet as brief examples—at least, it was helpful to me because I know a perhaps abnormally high percentage of people who swear by these two activities as cure-alls for just about any ailment (Peloton cycling could probably be thrown in with an updated essay). But the researchers he discussed also use the late talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh as an example of an incredibly effective echo chamber:

“Limbaugh uses methods to actively transfigure whom his listeners trust. His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view. And outsiders are not simply mistaken—they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers.  . . . The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination.”

As with Hoffer’s description of mass movements, facts cease to matter. What matters is what the echo chamber or movement’s leaders make of those facts. Unlike an epistemic bubble, “an echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth,” wrote Nguyen; “it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.” 

That sounds a lot like the kind of mass movement that Hoffer detailed. And while Nguyen doesn’t offer a cure or a fix for these phenomena, there are at least ways to think about them that might be helpful. 

The main method is through what Nguyen describes as a “social-epistemic reboot”: Whether you’re following René Descartes’s arguments in Meditations on First Philosophy or imagining a “hapless teenager” who’s grown up in a cult, what’s required is abandoning what they believe about pretty much everything and starting from scratch. Which honestly sounds terrifying for the average person and is probably why these positions are so hard for people to shift out of.

(It sounds terrifying for a society, actually, and writing that down just gave me some insight into the strength of resistance to change that seems to create upheaval in what many see as a “natural” order of things. Like, say, traditional hierarchies when you can’t fathom an orderly or peaceful society existing without them.)

What makes the difference is having at least one person outside of the echo chamber whom you can trust. Nguyen brings in the example of Derek Black, who was raised by a neo-Nazi family to be a neo-Nazi leader. He wasn’t looking for a way out of his indoctrination—he was in fact hosting a neo-Nazi radio show while in college—but a way found him in the form of a Jewish student at his undergraduate college who began inviting Black over for Shabbat dinners.

“In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval—a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled. Black went through a years-long personal transformation, and is now an anti-Nazi spokesperson. . . .

“Why is trust so important? Baier suggests one key facet: trust is unified. We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field—we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept. Reliability can be domain-specific. The fact, for example, that somebody is a reliable mechanic sheds no light on whether or not their political or economic beliefs are worth anything. But goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.”

(Which reminded me of an interaction I had recently that started with a near-stranger buying me a beer and ended with her telling me about Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements and the notion of being impeccable with your word.)

At the end of reading The True Believer—throughout reading it, in fact—I kept thinking of Nguyen’s essay and a subsequent conversation I’d had with a local friend about it. Our conversation had related to both a local white supremacist who’s caused enormous harm in our community, and to a church pastor about an hour’s drive south of us who had indicated publicly that he thought inter-faith dialogue was undesirable.

There was nothing, I thought, that either of us could do in these cases to persuade the people in question to come to some different kind of opinion. All one can do is remain open to dialogue while protecting one’s own safety and psyche, and actively work toward being the kind of person that people can trust. People do leave cults and exit echo chambers, and although Hoffer didn’t talk in his book about what could prompt people to leave mass movements, I don’t think it’s impossible for a movement to dissolve for various reasons—whether members come to terms with the harm that’s being caused, or trusted family members or friends leave some room for welcome, or some other inexplicable tipping point is reached.

I don’t necessarily know how to do this.† I’m just as angry and frustrated and exhausted as anyone else, especially recently as a variety of forces and factors seem hell-bent on proving just how selfish humans can be, just how hell-bent an entire society can make itself on causing others suffering if enough people persuade themselves that there’s an enemy to defeat, even when that enemy is your neighbor or your family.

But I’ve got a lot of influences in my life, including my Russian grandparents who never relaxed their adherence to honesty and ethics even in the face of Stalin’s purges, to remind me that self-protection doesn’t have to be my only driving force.

And I had this teacher, close to three decades ago, whose parents had, if I remember correctly, been German scientists brought over to work for the U.S. government, and he used his life to teach adolescent minds what it looks like when a society becomes mindless.

That teacher, and writers like Eric Hoffer who see much (though not all) with clarity, and researchers and thinkers who continue to work on compassion and cognitive empathy, remind us, once again, that we are not alone. Our resources are strained, our compassion is constantly challenged, and yet as a species humanity has been through far, far worse and has still not given up trying to be human.

*As I have a father who grew up under Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union, you can imagine how much this kind of language combined with constant fearmongering about communism from the exact same people gets under my skin. Everyone has different experiences that inform their lives; a wariness of those who insist on Party loyalty über alles is one of mine.

**I thought a lot while reading The True Believer about the oft-mentioned failures of critical thinking evidenced by American society’s widespread inability to analyze information and make informed choices over the last year or more. Critical thinking has been promoted as a basic educational standard for as long as I’ve worked in textbook editing—over 20 years—but I’d argue that it’s rarely been taught. Being able to read a paragraph and identify its main idea and supporting details in order to pass a standardized test is not even remotely critical thinking, but it’s far too often accepted as such. More recent movements to incorporate social-emotional learning curricula in schools seem to me far more beneficial, as they can serve to both bolster children’s growing senses of self—rather than looking outside for affirmation and identity—and continue to foster respect of other people, an antidote to dehumanization. That might be one tool to help build a nation of citizens both compassionate and thoughtful. For critical thinking I’d skip much of the advised lessons and simply incorporate Lincoln-Douglas style debate in upper-grade classrooms. There is nothing like having to defend a topic from every possible angle for teaching you to think critically.

†The places I’ve found most fruitful are ones where the “messy middle” are able to connect, and I think that there are more of them than we realize. They just don’t show up much on, say, Twitter.

Walking composition

“We’ve got a greater part of humanity working on making our social media feeds more persuasive than we have on making clean water more accessible.” —Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

I spent this last weekend doing volunteer conservation work for Artemis Sportswomen. I’m in the midst of doing a year-long advocacy training program through Artemis (which is an arm of the National Wildlife Federation) over Zoom, and it was a relief to get offline, meet everyone in person, and go outside to do some hands-on conservation work.

Pictured above is the work site, a slice of over 70,000 acres of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) rangeland in Horse Prairie, a 5-hour drive to a part of southwest Montana I don’t think I’ve ever even been to—close to Virginia City, a mining ghost town that I visited as a school kid, and south of Dillon, which I probably only went to for high school debate tournaments. Montana is a very large state, something that’s easy to forget up here in the tourist-saturated northwest pocket that encompasses Glacier National Park. The Horse Prairie region is not crowded. It’s the kind of unpeopled that prompts descriptors like “lonely” and “desolate.” The campground we stayed at, grassland sloping down to a reservoir, was open and silent except for flocks of geese, possibly cormorants but I didn’t get out my binoculars, and a solitary Western meadowlark (another bird whose call you should treat yourself to if you haven’t heard one).

I don’t think the birds find it desolate.

The work involved adapting a 3/4-mile stretch of barbed wire fencing to make it pronghorn*-friendly. Pronghorn run fast but don’t leap, so they almost never jump fences, which means they have to crawl under them, leading to serious injuries, some of which the coordinator showed us pictures of and I don’t think I’ll ever get out of my head.

In case this sounds like I know a whole lot about pronghorn, I’m basically just repeating what the coordinator instructed us in before we bounced our way up a two-track to the fence site and spent many scorching-hot hours removing barbed wire and replacing it with smooth wire. (This short video shows the differences between the two and how pronghorn respond. Also, the other volunteers did know quite a bit about pronghorn, as most of them had hunted the animals. I haven’t had that opportunity yet.) It was hours of tedious, hot work prying T-clips from the fence posts, trimming sagebrush, rolling up the barbed wire, unrolling new wire, attaching new T-clips and measuring every stretch to make sure it fell between 16-18 inches (high enough for pronghorn; too low for cattle to sneak through).** Knowing that the non-barbed wire’s smoothness will slide over pronghorns’ backs made me feel like I’d done something actively good for the world, at least for this one weekend.

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I’m in the midst of reading Kristin Ohlson’s book The Soil Will Save Us, all about soil science and the most up-to-date, on the ground research on microorganisms, loss of soil vitality, desertification, and—something I thought about a lot while standing on that bone-dry, hard-packed sagebrush land this weekend—the increasing understanding that a lack of wild, free-range grazing animals has played a huge role in thousands of years of worldwide soil degradation.

I learned last year from a local cattle rancher who’s deeply enthusiastic about restorative agriculture that cows’ grazing habits accelerate soil death, but that land still needs hooved grazing animals to nurture soil health, which is why he has established practices that mimic the way bison grazed the landscape instead. There’s a lot about this understanding in The Soil Will Save Us, including the multi-billion-year evolution of soil-plant symbiosis itself, and a pointed quip about Montana’s $50-million failed effort to eradicate knapweed: “They may as well proclaim it the state flower because there are now more than ever.”

Which was damned depressing to read, but as I look at my yard full of knapweed and thistles, I’m trying to take on the point that the plants’ flourishing presence is a sign of biodiversity loss, not a call for greater control. Which means I need a different approach but I don’t know what yet. Should I plant kale among the biggest patches of knapweed to encourage the deer to graze there so they churn up the hard-packed soil a bit? We certainly have enough deer around. Should I focus on pulling the knapweed and just trying to stop the thistles from flowering? I don’t know.

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Replacing barbed wire was one of those experiences that bring home the more nuanced relationships we could have with technology, if as a society we became more intentional about its uses. Ideally, I’d love to see all barbed wire fencing disappear. I’d love to see almost all fencing disappear and the bison let loose again, frankly. I know that’s not going to happen, but the kind of collaborative work that can figure out how to make fencing more wildlife-friendly and, crucially, persuade people to enact beneficial change, is the kind of work that I know goes on constantly, restoring our collective interconnectedness without ever being reported on in national news.

There are many things on fire, including literally parts of my state, but somewhere close to where you live somebody is doing the equivalent of improving the lives of wildlife simply by changing the kinds of fencing they have to navigate.

There’s a metaphor in that, as usual, but it’s one we each have to iterate for ourselves.

Bonus photo: Lots of barbed wire. A lot. Of barbed. Wire. Wire that no longer has an existence torturing poor pronghorn that are just trying to get from one place to another. Those bundles of wire are a win.

*I had thought that pronghorn and antelope were the same thing, but when I told a friend about this weekend, she corrected me. They are not in the same family, and though the pronghorn is unique to North America, its closest relative is the giraffe.

**There are a lot more details to this project, including that the coordinator, from the National Wildlife Federation, did his master’s thesis on fence-mapping. The more knowledgable Rachelle Schrute is going to be posting more about the project soon, and time-lapse video of our work, on her Instagram page, if you’re on Instagram and want to follow her. Rachelle’s a naturalist guide in Yellowstone National Park and an all-around badass who does a lot of media work for conservation.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• The long drive allowed me time to listen to all 8 episodes of the Fireline podcast from Montana Public Radio. Really enjoyable short episodes about our new and old reality of living with wildfire. I particularly appreciated episode 3 on paleoecology and episode 4 on the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribe’s experience bringing back fire and seeing native camas flowers swell in its wake.

• This might be a tough one for some, but I found this conversation on Blood Origins about trophy hunting’s ties with conservation to be really valuable. Particularly interesting because the guest, University of Gloucestershire entomologist and conservation ecologist Adam Hart, is very anti-hunting, especially trophy hunting, while also laying bare its current necessity for conservation. It’s a deftly handled difficult conversation. (That link is to Spotify because I can’t link to a specific episode on Blood Origin’s website, but the podcast is anywhere you listen. It’s episode 76.)

• Everyone’s favorite perennial gripe about the English language is that its spelling conventions make no sense. Linguist Arika Okrent writing in Aeon says that this is due less to mishmashes of culture—all languages are subject to those ebbs and flows—and more to technology and timing: “The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all.”

• I have long been in love with Japanese artist Katsushika Hosukai’s woodblock print “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” (I know I’m not alone in that!) ever since seeing it at The Met in New York, and enjoyed this 17-minute video about the historical context of the artist’s life during Japan’s isolationist Shōgun period.

• MIT Technology Review’s third episode of a four-part jobs and hiring series for its In Machines We Trust podcast focused on artificial intelligence games used in hiring, which, unfortunately, seem to be weighed heavily against women and people with disabilities. There is nothing we can do to stop AI and algorithms playing an increasing role in job placement and hiring. I can even see great arguments for it being useful and beneficial. But, like with barbed-wire fencing, its implementation can’t just be up to monopolists and rentiers who benefit from extracting the most out of humanity and the rest of life in the name of profit.

• That’s it for today! I’ve been camping a lot, and usually bring magazine backlogs to catch up on. I’m working my way through Montana Quarterly, but most of it isn’t online.

Walking composition

“How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?” —Henry George, Progress & Poverty, 1879

I was sifting through a big pile of index cards recently that contain research notes from my book. Quotes from books, articles, and interviews; attempts to categorize the subject of walking into enough discrete subjects that they could be broken up into chapters; color-coded observations of mine and others’ walking experiences. It was weird to remember how intensively I read for about three years, and what a relief it was when it was all over. I remember picking up Harry Potter at bedtime and saying to myself, “I forgot I like reading!” Not that I dislike the research reading. Tons of it is really interesting or I wouldn’t bother. But there are a lot of books and articles that are painful slogs for me, and I’d never finish them if I weren’t learning from them.

One index card quote was from a documentary titled Almost Sunrise that I’d almost forgotten about. It follows two veterans from the most recent war in Iraq as they walk 2700 miles from Wisconsin to California in an attempt to find some way to climb their way out of depression and PTSD. The trailer presents the story as having a predictable redemptive arc, but I don’t remember the movie that way. The two veterans’ experiences were far closer to what I heard from the Marine sniper veterans who run the Montana Vet Program, about PTSD, grief, and guilt, and what it takes to stop hiding from them. About facing the reality of living with it. The weight that people carry.

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People who did pilgrimages (usually the Camino de Santiago, but there are countless versions) talked about this weight, too. About walking and walking and walking hundreds of kilometers and somehow during that process finding that the layers of protection they’ve built up around grief have worn away, and they’re face with the immensity of it.

It sounds scary and absolutely necessary, especially for anyone dealing with grief or trauma, which is probably just about everyone. Coming across that index card made me think about the current panic about teaching the full, messy spectrum of history in American classrooms. How painful many people find the reality of the past, how much they are willing to sacrifice to hide from it, usually at the expense of others’ suffering. I took strength from a couple of posts that Patrick Wyman (host of the Tides of History podcast, which I enjoy specifically for the efforts he puts into excavating the history of real, everyday people out of our usual narratives of “history,” like European peasants’ rebellions) wrote on his Twitter feed:

“Lots of folks out there confuse ‘history’ with ‘stories from the past that make me feel good about who I am in the present.’ . . . History should make you feel uncomfortable. Lots of bad things happened. The past doesn’t exist to validate your sense of who you are in the present.”

We can apply this to just about anything in our lives, both individual and societal. Versions of the past we cling to to make ourselves feel safe and validated in the present.

I recently finished Riane Eisler’s new book Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives and Future, cowritten with Douglas P. Frye. They make a compelling case for the idea that humanity has lived within a partnership paradigm before, and could do so again. It was mind-opening to read their links between research on the brains of children who grow up in abusive or authoritarian households, and how that translates into adults who feel safer under authoritarian leadership; but I was particularly taken with their repeated point that Darwin only mentioned selfishness 12 times in his slightly lesser-known book Descent of Man. He wrote of love, however, 95 times, and moral sensitivity 92 times, because he wanted people to understand the importance of connection and caring to our evolution.

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Henry George, the economist whom early readers of this newsletter will know I’m a big fan of, attacked some of the most cherished history in the world when he published Progress & Poverty in 1879: private land ownership. All forms of it, but in certain sections he was particularly eloquent on the subject of inherited land ownership. England was his example—the titled and landowning classes whose inheritance was gained via frank theft in centuries past. Whose theft eventually gained the lustre of right simply by the passage of time. “It was not nobility that gave land,” he wrote, “but the possession of land that gained nobility.”

“It is not merely robbery in the past; it is robbery in the present—a robbery that deprives of their birthright infants that are now coming into the world! Why should I not hesitate about making short work of such a system?”

Injustices, too, can gain lustre simply by hanging around long enough and being accepted and lauded by those with platforms and the affirmation of the powerful. They become an invisible weight that all of society carries, an acceptance of “the way things are” that does not explain away why it all has to be so hard. A weight we are going to need some long walks to be able to face.

Running across the Almost Sunrise quote gave me pause and space, which was then flooded again with all the things that need to change about what we accept in our current reality. I’ll leave you with it:

“Every time we move West, we’re moving towards the ocean, we’re moving towards the setting sun. We’re trying to end things that haven’t been working for us. We’re trying to get to a point where we can turn around.”

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• An interview with Nityanand Jayaraman on the Subverse podcast about the Poromboke commons in India got right to the heart of what matters about the commons and how much is destroyed when we privatize them and then sacrifice their long-term health in the name of profit: “The only kind of infrastructure going right now is the infrastructure of commerce that is seeking to replace the infrastructure of survival, of sustenance, of local communities. My state government, my national government, is beholden to the large banks. . . . But for the local people, the people of India, the government meets us with water cannons and batons. You have a democratic system that is preoccupied with making bankers happy.” (Sounds familiar.) I also loved Jayaraman’s descriptions of the Poromboke itself, which was so lovely and evocative I want to visit.

• I’ve been following Jeremy Lent’s work for a while, though his book The Patterning Instinct is still on my TBR pile. This conversation between him and Douglass Rushkoff on Team Human might make me bump it up, though as Rushkoff mentions it’s a huge brick of a book. I took an online course Lent hosted last winter on development ecological civilizations, but in a way got more from this shorter conversation, especially when he talked about the connective tissue of humanity and its unrealized power, and a differentiation I hadn’t thought about before, between “consciousness” and “life.” “What evolutionary biologists have now really shown quite clearly is that, rather than this whole [Richard] Dawkins notion of the selfish gene outcompeting each other in this marketplace, actually life evolved its complexity through working out how to cooperate better with other species.”

• Annoyingly, the article from the winter 2020 issue of Montana Quarterly that I wanted to share isn’t even mentioned online anywhere. It’s by Carrie La Seur, with photographs by the incomparable Alexis Bonogofsky, and is titled “Disentangling the Law in Indian Country.” There aren’t a lot of people who do reporting on the madness of competing jurisdictions that allow so many (mostly white) people to get away with crimes simply because tribal police can’t pursue them, or how racist stereotypes exacerbate the problems of searching for missing persons, and this article was well written, so if you can find it it’s worth reading. Heck, I’ll send you my copy. Also, if you’ve never reading Debra Magpie Earling’s novel Perma Red, I highly recommend it. Be ready to downshift with it.

• Does science fiction reflect how we perceive our environment, or does it create perception? Interesting points about science fiction’s imaginative power posed by Sherryl Vint in MIT Press Reader. I probably would have given Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower more attention because it’s the most terrifyingly accurate depiction of the societal collapse and governmental decay accompanying climate change that I’ve ever read. I love that book. It also scares the bejesus out of me.

• Fascinating piece on the architecture of Soviet monotowns in former Eastern Bloc areas in ArchDaily. These photos literally made me snap my head back, smelling that peculiar mix of concrete decay, traffic exhaust, nostril-freezing cold, and something I’ve never been able to identify that nevertheless lands me instantly in Russia, no matter where I am.

• A 9-minute video from Aeon following a master pencil sharpener. Yup, an artisanal craftsman of sharpening pencils.

Walking composition

“Land is not land anymore. It’s capital. Two-thirds of the capital in the world is land. It’s all enclosed and it’s owned by not very many people who leverage that capital for debt.” —Tyson Yunkaporta on the As Temperatures Rise podcast

Campgrounds are a weird microcosm of community, commons, and the difficulties of sharing both. It’s perhaps in campgrounds that I first became a dedicated curmudgeon about the libertarian ethos—which I was very briefly attracted to in college—that we could all survive without governance if everyone just agreed to “don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.” In a campground, someone’s always taking your stuff, usually your peace and quiet, sometimes the scant water access, and very often the clean air and water itself. And I’ve been in situations where without some kind of intervention and enforcement, someone at a campground was going to get hurt.

But campers are on balance polite, even if I’m often having to ask them to turn off their music after dark (I’m discounting the family group last year that tried to hang a zip line across a popular swimming and boating route—their extreme lack of consideration was an outlier). And they share things, too, and because we go on an annual camping trip with a few other families there are always a pack of kids roaming around scavenging pancakes and sandwiches and s’mores from whomever happens to be providing them at that second. And people help one another set up and break down and borrow things they’ve forgotten (a mallet this year in my case). It’s really just like all the rest of life except with a sleeping bag, rain fly, and bear spray. And pea cord. You can never have enough pea cord.

—-

Sarah Miller’s essay on writing about climate change keeps revolving around my head. If you haven’t read it, it’s worthwhile doing so. She’s written about climate change and its effects wonderfully, and also six ways from Sunday, and it’s seemingly made no difference.

“Writing is stupid,” she wrote. “I just want to be alive. I want all of us to just be alive. It is hard to accept the way things are, to know that the fight is outside the realm of argument and persuasion and appeals to how much it all hurts.”

Writing is stupid. I’ve felt that for a long time. But why is it stupid? I wonder if it’s because writers expect to change the world with it. I am certainly guilty of that. Writing as a way to connect people, to share story, to find ways to ground ourselves and face grief and loss, and rejoice in life, to find the little detail that brings someone else’s mind and your own into momentary commonality, to shape the words that help people open their minds and find their own empathy—that isn’t stupid. And I think that’s what writing is for. It’s just awfully hard to let go of the ego nudges that whisper you could change the world with this. You could save it. That’s the stupid part. Writing is just story, and story is absurd and inefficient and glorious and what keeps us all swimming around this crazy world, for better or worse.

—-

At the campground I was at, there are always a bunch of Swainson’s thrushes singing at dawn. I usually listen to them with my coffee and a magazine because there’s nobody else up at that hour.

If you’ve never heard a Swainson’s thrush, treat yourself, though I haven’t yet found a recording that does it justice, especially in a pine forest with the sun rising behind ridiculously tall mountains. It’s absurdly, insanely beautiful, like the sunset in the photo above, which I take pictures of every year even though it never really changes in that place. It remains, like the best stories, absurdly, insanely beautiful.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• It’s often hypothesized that plague helped hasten the fall of Rome and the end of feudalism in Europe. Political economist John Rapley argues in Aeon that it’s not plagues themselves, but empire’s devotion to protecting wealth, whether through military adventures or stimulus packages, that creates vulnerabilities: “Whereas government stimulus programmes once kickstarted economic growth, today they tend to protect accumulated wealth. Western societies spend a lot of money just to stay rich.”

• Many cities are imploring the federal government to help them lower speed limits in high risk areas, but are hamstrung by decades of highway and traffic planning that is dictated by the fantasy of unhindered driving. This is demonstrated by adherence to the “85% rule,” which says that speed limits will be based on how fast people are traveling, not on how fast they should be traveling: “Critics say that rule, in use since the 1930s, locks in an auto-centric approach that is dangerously unsuited to urban streets, ratcheting speeds higher while pedestrian deaths have climbed 50% over the past decade.”

• Evidently the podcast universe wants to feed my slowly growing obsession with soil. Building Local Power recently did an episode with Maryland-based Million Acre Challenge, which aims to rebuild a million acres of healthy soil within the state.

• In Machines We Trust from MIT Technology Review continues its daunting look at AI’s growing and unseen influence on our lives. This episode looks at the use of AI and algorithms in job interviews. (This podcast is always very well structured and researched. I’m not sure what to think about the interview algorithm that gave a reporter a 70+% rating in English proficiency when she answered all the questions by reading a Wikipedia page in German. Nothing good, I guess.)

• This episode of As Temperatures Rise with mediator and conflict resolution-ist Ken Cloke was one of the most interesting I’ve heard in a while. How do we think in a democratic society not just about we want or what we think we have a right to, but instead about the kinds of dialogues that ensue if we talk about our interests and values?

• I recently read paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva’s book First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human and so used the opportunity to write a bit about it and bipedal evolution for Medium.

• I loved this article in High Country News about how a river revitalization project (as in: probably gentrification along the banks) might displace homeless people living along and from the river. “The Los Angeles River’s overlooked anglers,” by Miles Griffis in the April issue.

• Photography isn’t something I follow very much but I really enjoyed this piece in The American Scholar about Susan Meiselas’s “vernacular photographs” and her work in Iraqi Kurdistan and New York’s Little Italy. Reminded me of why Svetlana Alexeivitch’s The Unwomanly Face of War remains one of the most important books I’ve ever read.

• It’s that time of year when the EPA’s Fire and Smoke Map stays open on my phone. Do you know where your smoke comes from?

Walking composition

“If, try as we may, we never have been and never shall be able to see, to reflect the truth in all its eternal fresh-minted clarity, is it not because we are still in motion, still living?”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Reflection in Water”

A couple mornings ago I watched a dragonfly hang out on the riotous pea plants for a while. A lone chickadee trilled its cheeseburger call, and I ignored as well as I could the thistle plants fast outstripping my ability to spot-kill them with vinegar. It’s a nightmare, is all I can say. I go out my door and see thistles and knapweed; I go for a walk with a friend or my kids and see thistles and knapweed. I dream of thistles and knapweed and despair because there is so much of it, everywhere.

—-

I had a bit of a freak-out on a subscriber-only forum about finance recently. There were questions about 401Ks and buying houses versus renting and lots of other sensible topics and there I was going, “Yes, but what if the planet and our systems all fall apart and there’s no point to any of this anyway?” And then kept going to unbuckle the satchel of all the things I worry about all the time:

“Like, ‘What is the point of anything but also I need to make dinner.’”

“Will my area survive the mega fire future but also I need to be more consistent about eating sauerkraut.”

“How do I structure my Vanguard account but also are the ultra-religious white nationalists truly going to take over my county and/or state and force my daughter into an early marriage?”

(Also, why am I such crap at making sauerkraut? It’s not that hard and I do much more difficult things on a regular basis, yet it almost always spoils.)

This is all life all the time and likely always has been. My grandmother in the Soviet Union must have gone through this cycle constantly, especially when Stalin was still alive: “Will the KGB take my husband or me away for being an enemy of the people but also I need to find some potatoes.” I imagine she thought that, sometimes. I only met her twice, to my sorrow, and I barely spoke a smattering of Russian. She was a metallurgical engineer and in the evenings she did a kind of fancy Russian embroidery that involved picking out threads in linen to make lace patterns.

She also, with her husband and their three children, sat around the table at night reading forbidden Solzhenitsyn, passing the pages along as they finished each one. Because stories, along with music, keep us grounded when everything else feels untethered.

—-

It is hard to hold the concrete concerns about what to do with the now—to make normal, daily, grown-up decisions—alongside the existential question of what drastic changes might occur in the future. But I assume humans have been doing that for a very long time because we’ve long had to cope with day to day survival along with existential worry, even if the existential worry wasn’t always climate change and white nationalists but more cheetahs eating your children or when the next plague might hit.

I don’t know if this country will be a functional democracy in 5 years but also I should get my kids off their screens and outside this afternoon.

The decreasing snowpack is going to make the rivers and lakes too warm and promote toxic algae growth but also I should be more consistent about doing yoga.

Automation and AI are going to result in the loss of a bazillion jobs, a shift nobody but the people who stand to profit seems to be planning for, but I need to teach my kid how to solve equations with two variables this week.

And then there was a huge storm that same night, the day I watched the dragonfly and freaked out on the finance forum, and it poured and thundered and lightning flashed for hours and my daughter pulled me and two others over to the other side of the house we were at to look at the full-length rainbow. And we rejoiced in the rain and the thunder and worried that the lightning would be striking in places that were too dry to resist conflagrating—there was the joy and the fear, all wrapped up into one, and that is life, all the time.

Things are unpredictable and worrying, but they always have been, and in the meantime life is right in front of us. I will probably never come to radical acceptance with that. But I’m trying.

* h/t to TS for suggesting this title.

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There are quite a few new subscribers here thanks, I am guessing, to the kindness of Ed Roberson—host of Mountain & Prairie, one of my regular podcast listens—in mentioning this newsletter on his “Good News from the American West” updates. Thanks, Ed!

Welcome. The main focus of this newsletter is the commons—that is, the shared world we live in and how we manage to do that living together. Not an easy task most of the time, and often involving intense conflict between private property rights and shared resources. The overarching themes of this newsletter—which includes these triptych walking compositions as well as full-length essays—can be found in this first essay reflecting on misinformation and the invasion of Iraq, an essay on commodification, and one on white nationalism, the West, and the failures of large journalism narratives. Most published writing (as in published and edited in real places) can be found through my website, and my book on walking is available in all formats. I sometimes write on Medium but have no other social media.

I also talk about car supremacy and car-centric infrastructure, books I’m reading, embodied learning, and, most of all, my despair over knapweed and thistles. Please send help.

Thanks for joining! If it turns out not to be your jam, no hard feelings.

I will be completely offline all next week. Hope everyone stays safe and temperate and kind.

—-

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Razib Khan writing in Nautilus about how the image and our understanding of the human family tree has changed significantly, complicating what we think of as “human” DNA: “The emergence of modern humans within [Africa] was not an explosion, but a gradual evolution of interacting lineages. A slow burn.”

• A very cool explanatory mathematics video from Veritasium (only 6 minutes) about how an infinite hotel can actually run out of rooms. Which reminded me of the equally cool fact that there are many infinities.

• This essay by Sarah Miller is the best thing I’ve read on climate change recently, and reflects exactly how I feel about both it and many other problems whose solutions are fairly clear but for which political will is nonexistent: “It is hard to accept the way things are, to know that the fight is outside the realm of argument and persuasion and appeals to how much it all hurts. . . . But all the right words about climate have already been deployed.”

• Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct, about how humans make meaning, was on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast to talk about his recently published book The Web of Meaning: “At the deepest archetypal layers, we share the experience of what it is to be alive with every other living entity.”

• Your Undivided Attention (the podcast from the Center for Humane Technology) recently did a long episode with Daniel Schmachtenberger. I’ve listened to a number of interviews with Schmachtenberger in various places over the years, and like how clearly he lays out the problems of existential risk. Being a math/logic person myself, his style of defining the parameters appeals to me. It is a bit tiresome to hear what is actually common sense, and which has been stated in many ways by a lot of Indigenous thinkers and writers as well as many, many women (also anyone who has ever written or said anything about commons systems), promoted as a completely new way of thinking. But as I try to focus on playing infinite games (or the infinite game) rather than finite games, anything that gets the tech-bro and think-tank-y crowds on board with doing all of this (waves randomly at the entire state of human existence) better is, I guess, good. Anyway: “We could say the central question of our time is if we’ve been poor stewards of power for a long time and that’s always caused problems, but the problems now become existential . . . They become catastrophic. We can’t keep doing that. How do we become adequately good stewards of exponential power in time?”

• A lovely interview on the Scotland Outdoors podcast with Katharine Norbury about Women on Nature, her anthology drawing in 700 years of women writing about nature.

Walking composition

“It’s hard to make people understand something if their entitlement is dependent on them not understanding it.” —Derrick Jensen (paraphrasing Upton Sinclair)

I finished historian James C. Scott’s book Against the Grain yesterday, and it’s spun me off into a lot of thoughts about where we are as a species and where we came from. I think I’ll save longer thoughts for a more essay-ish post, but toward the end a lot of the ideas I’ve been trying to grasp at about ownership, commons, and freedom fell into place. I was reminded of a line in one of my older essays (republished in this really incredible anthology benefiting the Montana Land Reliance): “For those of the pioneer spirit, there is nowhere left to run.”

Two things about that. One is that I don’t think I believe in a “pioneer spirit” anymore. People like my ancestors were hardworking, and within the framework of their time, they were brave (it’ll probably be a lifelong project for me to weigh who they were in the best senses against the system of genocide and theft they willingly participated in) to try to make a living on land they didn’t know, but I don’t think there was a spirit involved, pioneer or otherwise. They had a lot of hope and gumption and a willingness to disregard Native people’s right to continue living with the land that was being stolen from them, but the core point about a supposed pioneer spirit is that they, like most pioneers and homesteaders, were fleeing something.

What pioneers didn’t understand (I suspect) is that they brought what they were fleeing with them.

—-

My post recently about Very Big Trucks was slightly misleading. I own a truck. It could even be classified as Very Big because it’s a 1979 Chevy and those things were built boxy. My spouse and I had been talking about buying a truck for years because we like to camp and paddleboard and kayak and bike (well, he likes to bike; I do not love biking because sitting in any form for lengths of time is painful for me) and we need a way to haul gear around. Strapping everything to the Subaru is what we’ve done for years, but with kids and a dog it’s . . . tight.

Anyway, so we wanted a truck. And I’d been holding out for an electric truck because when we traded our Volkswagen in for the Subaru in 2010 I was firm that I wanted it to be our last combustion engine. Surely, I thought, fully electric vehicles were just around the corner.

Well, surely not. We waited and waited and last year our friends decided to part with their ’79 truck for a nominal sum and it just seemed dumb to either keep waiting for reliable electric trucks, and/or spend a ginormous amount of money on a newer vehicle when all we needed was something to haul stuff around in.

So we bought it and we haul stuff around in it, though mostly it sits around earning its name, Rusty. I kind of weirdly love driving it because it has a Suburban engine and I spent my teenage years driving a ’76 Suburban after wrecking my parents’ used Dodge sedan.

I once mentioned to my mother the frequency of my car crashes (there have been a number) and she said (jokingly), “There’s a reason it’s called kar-ma, Nia.”

—-

The other thing about that pioneer spirit line is the running. There really is nowhere left to run. Yes, I do believe humans will eventually go to Mars and might even someday colonize it, and I use that word “colonize” purposefully because I don’t think we’re going to be thoughtful about it. But anyone who thinks Musk or Bezos is going to let them hop a ride and run off to a libertarian utopia under a red dawn is kidding themselves. It’s going to take an enormously long time, like decades if not 100 years, involve very few people at the outset and even then only people who can contribute certain types of expertise (like knowing how to build and maintain the machines that can mine water from sand), and life there is going to be very, very difficult. There will be no “I’m free now” homesteading, no “government can’t tell me what to do” survival prepping. It will be interdependence at its most intense because people will be trying to exist on a planet that we did not evolve on. Humans can’t even breathe on Mars, something that Mars enthusiasts seem startlingly eager to forget.

But the truth is—I was thinking this after finishing Against the Grain—there never was anywhere to run. Homo sapiens have been trying to escape state and/or elite control since states and elites first came into existence, but the need for surplus and others’ labor to invent luxury for a few was always going to crawl across the planet. Every move to a frontier was only a temporary reprieve. Which means, in the end, that we’re stuck forever in the same situation humans were in 3000 BCE Uruk or some similar “civilization”: we have to learn to live together on a finite planet with finite resources. Which means we have to learn how to work with and steward the ecosystems we live among—at scales both global and hyper-local—with an eye to actual sustainability for the very long term.

Which means giving a whole heck of a lot of things up. Like car-dependent infrastructure, and single-use plastics, and privatized water, and acceptance of chemical and oil spills, and vacation homes. And the perception that persuades us we can make a free life without interdependence, and without understanding that our running to freedom is always going to be someone else’s invasion and displacement.

Overall, just give up commodification along with the fantasy of absolute individualism. And probably my truck.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• I listened to a couple of Earthfire Institute podcast episodes while driving down to meet up with one of my favorite people (with whom I subsequently discussed the frustration of having no option other than driving): One on radical change with Derrick Jensen and the other on interrelatedness with Stan Rushworth. I go back to Rushworth frequently because every interviewer asks him what advice he has for all of us living through “these difficult times,” and he always starts with “which times?” and reminds them that he was born during World War II, and then details the genocide—a 90% population loss—that his people lived through (Rushworth is a Cherokee elder) not much more than 100 years ago. It’s a reminder I frequently need.

• Said friend recently told me about a new podcast from Martin Shaw called Smoke Hole Sessions. They’re kind of fun, meandering conversations with people Shaw has worked with and it all revolves around the importance of story. They’re all interesting in their own ways and I look forward to more.

• Also via said friend, an amazing issue of Canada’s Briar Patch magazine on the topic of the “land back” movement. One line from this interview with Jo-Ann Saddleback particularly struck me: “It didn’t mean ‘this is my territory, don’t come here.’ It meant ‘I have the inalienable right to protect this land.’” YES.

• After I shared the interactive water droplet map last time around, someone sent me this global wind map, which I wish I could just turn into a screen saver. So soothing. (I note today that there is not, um, a whole lot of movement above the Pacific Northwest.)

• Pairing with Against the Grain, a pointed and comprehensive essay in Aeon by philosopher Kim Sterelny about how humans spent 97% of our existence living fairly equitably, and how we can start to reclaim that right: “Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’ (whatever that is). Indeed, for most of human history we lived in such societies. But such societies are not inherently stable. These social practices depend on active defence.”

• Another reader sent an episode of the Building Local Power podcast, which is a new one to me but which I fell in love with immediately. It’s a great complement to the Frontiers of Commoning podcast and seems to work in a lot of the areas that the Create Real Democracy group does about uprooting corporate control over life and democratic institutions. (Is corporate control the knapweed?) This episode on racial justice and the anti-monopoly fight was excellent and reminded me of where and why I started digging into the history of corporate control in the first place.

• Banning left turns could drastically reduce car crashes. Popular Mechanics reported on a study out of Penn State detailing the relationship between crashes and left turns. “People are already wising up to the idea that left turns can be brutal and should be avoided.” I’m going to post that up in my house since everyone makes fun of me for the lengths I go to to avoid turning left.

• Almost forgot! I am trying a new thing on Medium through their Partner program. Assuming I can manage to keep up with myself (hahahahaha, many of you know how long it takes me to reply to emails and know that this will never happen), I’ll be writing essays about walking on the platform about twice a month. The first one went up week before last, and I’m planning on this week’s to be about bipedalism and paleoanthropology. (I just finished Jeremy DeSilva’s book First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human and really enjoyed it.)

I wrote an essay recently that I shared with my writing group, noting that it was one “for the vault.” One of the other members came up with that phrase a few years back to refer to essays we wanted to craft and share and maybe revise and improve—an essay, in other words, not a letter or journal entry—but wouldn’t be sending out into the world for the foreseeable future, if ever.

Essays “for the vault” are often about parenting experiences, though not always. Sometimes, for me at least, one will involve an experience that affected me personally, often traumatic, but that is someone else’s story to share, or keep private. Which, really, all parenting stories are anyway.

My writing group members and I started meeting online over Google Hangout long before the pandemic—I’m thinking 2012 or 2013—before any of us had ever met in person. Most of us had written parenting essays for Brain, Child magazine, and followed the founder and former editor when she moved to launch the essay site Full Grown People. It was in a Facebook group for FGP’s writers that we met and formed an online writing group where we workshopped essays once a month and got to know one another.

At some point each of us stopped writing about our children. We’re all mothers, and it’s a strange territory to navigate, where your baby’s life and stories start out as being also your own life and stories, but, for most, eventually turns into their own life and stories. At different points and for different reasons each of us seemed to find that those stories were no longer ours to narrate. When I do drag one of my kids into an essay these days, I try to make it not really about them but about something larger—I often fail at that and always feel guilty.

Where do parental rights end and a child’s ownership of their self and autonomy begin? What kind of experiences can a parent restrict, or damage inflict, before a child’s future potential is irrevocably limited?

This question is the main reason I don’t share photos of my kids online. I did, when they were little, for about five years. Sometimes a friend will send me a screenshot of a Facebook “memory” that came up for them featuring one of my kids as a baby or toddler, even though I deleted all photos of them years before deleting my Facebook account. Facebook owned those photos the second I posted them, which I knew at the time but it still annoys me.

This is a much bigger issue than any of us realizes because most of the world has no inkling of what kind of control data mining will eventually have over our lives. The moment a prospective parent posts about being pregnant, filing adoption papers, or shares a sonogram photo or a coming-home day—from the very first post, that social media company owns part of that child’s future because they own the data, and none of us knows what that will come to mean.

On the other hand, these platforms are almost the only medium many of us have to share the milestones and experiences and challenges of life, even privately. We’re not given much of a choice even as we’re not given any control over what companies do with the data they glean. What about Facebook support groups, which can be a lifeline, for parents of children with rare illnesses or certain disabilities?

Maybe we ought to be able to share photos of and stories about our kids and the realities of parenting with people who care without that decision having detrimental effects on their future lives that we can’t foresee.

One of the reasons I get hung up on digital tech is because, after years of studying the loss of walking in America, it’s impossible for me to not see the way that car-centric infrastructure, from crosswalk design to the way we build cars themselves, damages every facet of human life. It’s a technology whose consequences weren’t predicted in the beginning, and so its shape and impact were determined by those who stood to profit, with the result that human society serves cars, not the other way around.

I see digital technology, including AI and data mining, as the equivalent of automobiles in the 1920s, when mass protests against cars’ speed, space-hogging, and deathly toll defined society’s relationship to them, until men from car companies created think tanks to serve their purposes, and eventually climbed into governmental positions to smash highways through neighborhoods, bend our lives around suburban car dependency, and then spend decades convincing society that this was the life we’d dreamed of.

The fundamental problem isn’t technology—I wrote this piece with a pen in a notebook under in an electric light before typing it on my laptop to then post it to the magical interwebs so it could arrive in your inbox, all while listening to a Spotify playlist, technology every step of the way—the problem is whether society is allowed to determine how that technology is used, or whether we exist to serve the profit motives of its owners and creators.

I don’t fully know how that will play out with digital technology, whether we’re talking about regulation of data mining or better anti-monopoly enforcement or a new vision of a democratic internet like MIT’s SOLID project or whether we’re going to lose more of ourselves and our health and our communities because nobody got a handle on the thing early enough. But I do know that for the moment my kids’ only protection against the data mining that will inevitably shape part of their future is me minimizing their online presence.*

And when it comes to children and self-determination this isn’t a tech-only problem. I first got interested in the tension between parental rights and children’s rights to own their own future selves after reading Hella Winston’s Unchosen, a 2009 nonfiction book adapted from the author’s Ph.D. thesis that followed young adults who’d grown up in a strict ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York—young adults who wanted to leave the community or at least explore the opportunities of the world a bit more, but none of whom had the educational or social skills to even know where to begin because their culture restricted their educational and social access. As I wrote in my old blog at the time:

The women the author meets have only a 4th-grade education. The men have what run-of-the-mill secular Westerners might deem a warped view of sex and sexuality. Many of the men and women barely speak English. Not a one of them is trained in any useful trade or skill beyond reading Hebrew, caring for children, or basic carpentry, this in the center of one of the world’s great metropolises of opportunity.

After finishing the book, I was left with the feeling that, by giving adults the freedom to raise their children in their own religion, and by allowing them to keep their children from contact with the outside world, we have, by societal assent, stolen these people’s freedom to choose almost anything once they become adults.

I thought about that book again recently when a friend and I were talking about a local evangelical Christian megachurch that he and his wife had attended out of curiosity, and in which they watched, horrified, as the pastor (with the usual emotion-manipulating light show, music, etc.) declared that everyone who was not saved would be going directly to hell when they died. That wasn’t the part that horrified them. What horrified them was watching a clutch of very young children race down the aisle, crying and terrified at the idea of hell, to be saved.

And I was reminded of it again when reading a thread a few months back by a Montana woman who’d grown up in a fundamentalist Christian homeschooling family. It’s really worth reading in full. This woman doesn’t know me from Adam, but I am grateful that she shared her experiences, which echo somewhat those of Tara Westover’s ultra-religious unschooling experience growing up in Idaho, though of different Christian sects.**

The point isn’t religion/not religion, but what happens to many of these people as they become adults. People whose religious upbringing demanded ignorance and the cultivation of guilt and fear, or people brought up by adults who abused them and undermined their sense of self and capability, or people brought up simply lacking the skills—whether practical, linguistic, educational, or social—to give them enough flexibility that they might maintain some determination over their own eventual lives.

What rights do our future selves have? It’s a question that perhaps every parent could entertain because our children’s needs and dependencies are going to vary massively, but it’s also a question I wish tech companies—and road designers and chemical companies and mining conglomerates—were required to factor into their designs.

It’s frustrating knowing that I can’t even share an essay “for the vault” with my writing group without Google’s Gmail program trawling it for the advertising maw, much less share a photo of my kids or any details about their lives without Facebook et al. mining that information for usable data. So I let go, a little, and don’t even know what might be lost in the choices I’m struggling to make.

The vast inheritance of digital technology at our fingertips should be designed to allow all of us to make those choices with a radically different view of freedom in mind. We should be able to use them trusting that the natural, absolutely vital human need for connection shouldn’t simply be feed for the captains of industry and profit. With the question at the forefront of business meetings not being “How can I sell you more stuff?” but “What will enable your future self’s best chance at self-determination?” Maybe all of our technologies, religion included, should be designed with that question in mind.

My group has seen our writer-parent relationships change dramatically over the years. We’ve gone through intense experiences and a lot of trauma and worry and work. We’ve put a lot in the vault; it’s in that act, maybe, that we’ve learned to begin letting go of the idea that our children are ours rather than their own, privatizing our experiences in order to let them live as fully as possible while knowing the privilege we’ve been afforded to make that choice.

*I’d still like better answers from school districts about what happens with the data from all the programs they use, from Google classroom to proprietary standardized tests to the “learning” programs like my favorites-to-loathe IXL and Xtra Math. The programs I’ve seen largely do a terrible job of supporting, for example, math education, but I wonder how much the companies that own them benefit from the data they glean from the kids’ activities. It’s not an issue that school districts, with one exception that I know of, are well equipped to ask, much less answer.

**If you want to go deeper into that rabbit hole, this thread by R.L. Stollar on a history “textbook” commonly used in homeschooling families and private Christian schools is eye-opening, as is this one about the same textbook by schoolteacher Josiah Hawthorne. Or you could just . . . not go down those rabbit holes. I don’t know what my capacity it is for knowing about things that make me want to hide my family in the woods for pretty much ever, but things like this make me think I’m reaching it. Except that I know there is no level of separation or security that can protect us from one another. The only answer is to reach deeper in and try to reduce suffering for as many as possible.

Walking composition

“When bird does wait thy absence long,
Nor tend unto its morning song;
While thou art searching stoic page,
Or listening to an ancient sage,
Whose spirit curbs a mournful rage,
                                    Forget me not.”
—from “Forget Me Not,” Ann Plato

I have to confess, I’ve never actually enjoyed gardening that much. I’m more of a hunter-gatherer than an agriculturalist. I’d prefer to both hunt and gather than to tend. But once I started to think about it not as gardening/growing things but as caring for and restoring the soil—an in between place of husbandry—it magically became something I craved. Ever since my own kids became toddlers, I’ve seen children’s tendency to collect sticks and rocks as answering a craving for groundedness, a craving we maybe learn to suppress or to answer with other, less fulfilling, things as we grow. Listening to that interview a couple of weeks ago about soil redirected my focus in profound ways that I hope will last (though I purchased and read the interviewee’s book, and it ended up being all about the divine feminine, etc., not about soil at all really, which was disappointing but made me think I should finally get around to reading Kristin Ohlson’s The Soil Will Save Us).

The thistles and knapweed continue to be overwhelming. It’s a relief to walk around town and find forget-me-nots and wild phlox in shady places making friends with aspen trees. But even with the thistles and knapweed, at least I’ve got my hands and feet in the dirt.

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In this week’s newsletter from Create Real Democracy, an historical note I hadn’t heard before on the ongoing difficulty with the corporations-are-people argument:

“1949 – Justice William O. Douglas dissents in Wheeling Steel Corp. v. Glander [337 U.S. 562] Supreme Court decision – states that corporations are not persons
Regarding the ruling that corporations are given rights as persons under the 14th Amendment, Douglas stated, ‘I can only conclude that the Santa Clara case was wrong and should be overruled . . . There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view nor was the result so obvious that exposition was unnecessary . . . If they [the people] want corporations to be treated as humans are treated, if they want to grant corporations this large degree of emancipation from state regulation, they should say so. The Constitution provides a method by which they may do so. We should not do it for them through the guise of interpretation.’”

“Santa Clara” being the infamous 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that granted corporations rights of personhood under the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Except it didn’t, quite. The personhood argument was a headnote added by a Reporter of Decisions (who happened to have formerly been the president of a railway company), and was then approved by the Chief Justice. It was never actually part of the justices’ opinion, either majority or dissenting, and yet its effects last to this day.

—-

Fertile soil is both a metaphor and a real-life dire need. Our soil is depleted and exhausted, but so are our imaginations. We’ve strip-mined everything, including ourselves.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• When we’re looking for extraterrestrial life, what do we mean by “life”? In Sapiens, Gideon Lasco writes that for anthropologists, the assumptions have changed drastically. “The discovery of possible evidence of alien microbes on Venus may constitute a “minimalist” version of people’s expectations of extraterrestrial life—but it is still relaunching age-old discussions about humanity’s place in the world, and our world’s place in the universe.”

• New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie talking up e-bikes and the essential work of civic engagement on the War on Cars podcast. “We’re experiencing this right now. A big, massive relief bill was passed by the Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress, and the Republicans in Congress are going on about Dr. Suess or whatever. I think the right response is just not even to engage it. . . . I don’t know how much that’s going to work, but I do know that endlessly trying to litigate culture war stuff from the perspective of governance is a fool’s errand.”

• I forgot to link to this last time around: Kate Raworth’s excellent interview about her Doughnut Economics Lab on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast. I might have quietly become a fangirl solely for her focus on just getting shit done: “It’s all about action. . . . I really sincerely believe that 21st-century economics is being practiced first; it will be theorized later.”

• Pondercast on all the noise of gathering and togetherness that’s been missing over the last year.

• If you liked The Overstory, you might enjoy this interview with forest ecologist Suzanne Simard about her life’s work and her new book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

Walking composition

“It has been my experience that I am always true from my point of view, but am often wrong from the point of view of my honest critics.” —Mahatma Gandhi

I can’t remember before seeing such a quantity of Very Large Trucks (and Also Jeeps) as I’ve seen over the past month in my area. They are . . . Very Large. I know this is a recent design change to make trucks look more intimidating (insert massive eye-rolls here), and I’ve been a bit angry, I guess, at seeing such large numbers of them on the road, wondering if they’re people who moved to Montana recently looking for a mythical place where “government” will leave them alone. It feels telling but also completely prejudicial of me that I am constantly noticing their license plates, almost all of which are Washington or California.

The article I linked to above has some telling quotes from car manufacturers about this new design shift:

“The specific design trend of the massive hood sticking way out in front of the driver, with a cliff-face front grille obstructing the view several feet out in front of the wheels, is entirely a marketing gimmick. The explicit point is to create an angry, aggressive face that will intimidate others, especially pedestrians. Don’t take it from me, take it from the guy who designed the latest GM Sierra HD: ‘The front end was always the focal point . . . we spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it’s going to come get you. It’s got that pissed-off feel.’”

Certainly working on me, and I have little doubt that it works for the people who choose to drive them for that reason. What we definitely need in this world are larger vehicles that make expressing superiority and killing or maiming people easier.

—-

Everything I wrote above is saturated with judgment, and there are far more words sitting at the end of my tongue that I either didn’t let out, or deleted. I struggle with judgment, like everyone else who’s trying to be more compassionate, empathetic, and generally just not an asshole. It’s one of the reasons I loved the book Eating Dirt so much—I kept waiting for Charlotte Gill to write just one line passing judgment on the timber companies, the Canadian colonial government, and the practice of clear-cutting that has caused so much damage. She never did, and she managed to not do it without avoiding the issue, somehow, magically, such a hard thing to do as a nonfiction writer. Her ability to write with honesty and clarity about dirt and forestry and the labor of tree-planting without explicit judgment of the forces that caused the damage kept throwing me back on myself.

Why did I want her to judge so badly? How did she manage to write of extraction and its harms in a way that felt like . . . I don’t know, like the eons-slow process of creating soil itself? Is the urge to judge and condemn, even when it’s justified, its own kind of strip-mining?

—-

Watching those trucks has got me thinking a lot about how it feels to be in a vehicle, which is something I pondered a great deal while writing my book. About how a car is not just an expression of identity, but an extension of our physical self. When other parents here complain about the length of the car line for dropping their kids off at school, there is no consciousness that when you’re taking yourself and/or your kids somewhere in a car, you’re not just taking your bodies and selves; you’re taking several thousand pounds of self that you deem necessary, or is necessary due to lack of transit and a walkable life, to your movement in the world. Those trucks and Jeeps are a clear manifestation of the hunger to take up more space, to declare that nobody can limit not just your chimeric-like freedom, but how you exist in this world, what you do, how much you consume, how much space you can spread your self into. Not just yourself. Your self. All its desires and angers, its needs and wants, its craving for judgment and control.

To keep that self contained barely within your own body, to subvert the need to surround it with more space, more power, more declaration of your existence and entitlements, is incredibly difficult.

I should stop saying “you.” It’s not like I don’t drive.

Is my desire to judge, my craving for righteous indignation and anger, little different than those big trucks? I can argue that it causes less harm, but that is not something I know for sure. Maybe they’re both just manifestations of a need for control.

I still think those designs should be illegal, not because they prompt anger and fear but because they truncate drivers’ sightlines (it’s hard to see past the high, straight hood, especially hard to see children) and are partly linked to an undeniable rise in pedestrian deaths over the past few years (see also: road design). So just, no. I can’t say no, we shouldn’t have this thing in this world while also refraining from judging it, can’t I? I can try.

—-

Some stuff to read, watch, listen to, or tinker with:

• Somewhere I stumbled across this amazing interactive map that uses USGS data to allow you to follow a raindrop from anywhere in the continental United States to its eventual spill into an ocean. I have a longstanding obsession with waterways, creeks, rivers, hydrology, watersheds, and the general unseen role of water in our lives, and plan on leaving this up to play around with whenever I feel like wasting time stalking news or poking around Twitter.

• Filmmaker Neil Halloran’s half-hour somewhat interactive (only on the website) documentary about uncertainty in climate change science is probably the first new thing I’ve seen about climate change in years. Small insights, but well-articulated ones.

• Scott Santens was one of the first people I ever talked with about Universal Basic Income, back when I was still on Twitter a few years ago. He wrote a post for Humanity Forward that does a great job of explaining why unemployment insurance isn’t the reason that business owners and managers are having a hard time finding people to work for them: “The employees they want are doing unpaid work at home that they can’t or don’t want to stop doing. People aren’t lazy. They’re working outside the labor market. . . . Second, employers are finding that by raising their wages, they are in fact able to find willing employees. It’s like this one neat trick that just seems to work.” (Emphasis in original.)

• Lucy Jones writing in The American Scholar about researching the physical and mental health benefits of spending time in nature for her book Losing Eden, and how her understanding of those benefits deepened during England’s Covid-19 lockdowns. I’m intrigued by what she says about access to nature and the biophilic city movement: “The biophilic city movement reimagines a human habitat that allows for nature and incorporates the nonhuman world into all its aspects, with walkable neighborhoods, bicycle-friendly towns, rewilded roundabouts, greened parking spaces, city forests, equal distribution of tree cover, car-free streets where children can play, meadows instead of lawns, and playgrounds and schools filled with greenery, trees, and flowers. . . . Can we balance a respect for nature, a humble reverence, an absence of arrogance, with a new kindness?”

• I’ve had Greg Jackson’s essay in The Point queued up for ages to share here as I tried to get my own head around it. It’s kind of about how politics is colonizing our humanity, but also about other things that I’m having some trouble grasping. Somewhat about how art can mitigate the colonization effect, but he also mentions that he was surprised by how shallowly art has responded to the upheavals of the last several years (one example is that the bestselling books are mostly political, and that our daily activities involve “scouring social media for fresh political stimulation,” but I wonder if there’s a lot of other art he’s missing—as in, the art might be there but you have to look hard for it—plus what about the success of books like The Overstory?). Anyway, there’s a lot in there and I obviously have no hot takes or quick conclusions, which is probably all to the good. “It is not clear that politics is improved by our relentless fixation on it” is likely true in the context that he’s discussing, but it’s not improved by our ignorance, either.

• My copy editing work the last couple weeks led me to the book The Cat Man of Aleppo, and the story of Mohammad Alla Aljaleel and the cat sanctuary he established in Aleppo during the ongoing Syrian civil war. If you want your heart filled and broken and brought back bigger for a couple of minutes.

Walking composition

“And are not men than they more blind, 
Who having eyes yet never find 
The bliss in which they move”
—from “Walking,” by Thomas Traherne (1637-1674)

I broke a bunch of Mason jars last week, nice ones, through sheer stupidity or ignorance or—my preferred interpretation—to create science lessons for the kids.

I know that liquid expands when it freezes. When I fill a container for the freezer, I leave space for that reason. But sometimes (most of the time) my grasp of physics has gaping holes, like not realizing that expansion can happen in all directions, not just into available space but also into unavailable space.

There’s a metaphor in that, but then there’s always a metaphor.

—-

Sometime back when I started this newsletter I wrote a piece about the flaws in the ways we teach science, how it’s too abstract and not hands-on enough and that’s a big reason why you get things like climate denial and anti-vaccination arguments and unregulated water pollution, because it is really hard to intuitively grasp cause and effect when you don’t have a hands-on experience of it. One of the most memorable books I read in the last decade was Frank R. Wilson’s The Hand, which makes the argument that the human brain evolved to be so large because we use our hands so dexterously, not so that we could use our hands. Our hands’ ability to manipulate things, he argued, drove our brain’s growth and evolution.

By putting all our learning’s weight in the brain, we shortchange our capabilities for understanding. We are missing and misunderstanding most of reality because we don’t give ourselves chances to fully engage with it, especially as children.

—-

I’ve been trying for years to reduce our household plastic. One of the consistent holdouts is the freezer, so when I made chicken broth recently I decided to try freezing it in Mason jars instead of Ziplock bags partly because of the plastic and partly because every single Ziplock springs a pinhole leak when I thaw chicken broth, meaning its usefulness a second time is seriously reduced and I’m convinced they make them that way on purpose. They didn’t used to spring a leak and it’s the same spot every time, in a bottom corner.

Anyway, you might know where this is going. I thought I was being smart partially filling half-gallon Mason jars with broth and placing them uncovered in the freezer. Space to expand! is what I thought. Every single one of the jars shattered in very interesting patters and I lost both the jars and the broth. At least it was a direct demonstration for the kids of what “liquid expands when it freezes” means, but I wish I’d done it with just one jar. (That had occurred to me when I was filling them, but I’m just as much of an idiot as anyone else most of the time.)

Plastic is flexible, pliable, moldable and so very, very useful. I almost never have to worry about finding pools of frozen chicken broth in the freezer when I dispense it into plastic bags. But when I look at the pools of waste and contamination that plastic leaves behind in air, water, soil, and human bodies, the space it takes up is so large I can barely grasp it.

What if all of reality is just metaphors expanding into one another’s spaces?

—-

Bonus photo: the evidence

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• This piece by Ian Gilligan in Aeon about how the need for clothing—rather than food—might have spurred the development of agriculture was really fascinating, and engagingly written: “The pattern of clothing in Aboriginal Australia can challenge a number of cherished theories about the origin of clothing. For one, routine Aboriginal nakedness implies that humans didn’t invent clothes due to some inherent sense of modesty. Neither, as hunter-gatherers, did we need clothes for the sake of appearance.”

• Serendipitously, someone in another newsletter forum recommended a podcast episode that then led me to this one with Erin You-Juin McMorrow, author of Grounded, a book about . . . soil. Considering the responses to that post about soil, I think a lot of people here might enjoy it. There’s a lot in the interview about the divine feminine, which you can skim over if that’s not your thing, but the parts about soil definitely made me want to read the book.

• An acquaintance sent me this Atlantic article on the role that minimum parking requirements play into the housing problems so many of our communities face. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—parking is an unseen plague and if we want vibrant communities we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with it: “The trouble with parking requirements is twofold. First, they don’t do what they’re supposed to, which is prevent curb congestion. . . . Second—and more consequential—parking requirements attack the nature of the city itself, by subordinating density to the needs of the car.”

• Martin Tisne writing in MIT Technology Review about the desperate need for collective data rights: “Individuals should not have to fight for their data privacy rights and be responsible for every consequence of their digital actions. Consider an analogy: people have a right to safe drinking water, but they aren’t urged to exercise that right by checking the quality of the water with a pipette every time they have a drink at the tap.” (I agree, but also wonder if the author fully comprehends that the privatization of every single thing that we rely on to survive is the overall point.)