It's not either/or, but both!

Cindy at Ordo Amoris is holding a book club discussion for Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. I'm not at all confident that I'm going to be able to participate regularly or thoroughly, but I did figure I could type out a quick response to the first section.

The first section (not one of the ten ways yet, so I won't call it a chapter) is called "Why Truth Is Your Enemy: Or Gradgrind Without the Facts." I think the subtitle is a good summary, once you understand what it means.

Gradgrind was the utilitarian schoolmaster in Dickens' novel Hard Times. He drilled his students in rote methods, but missed teaching the essence. In an early chapter, he praises the student Bitzer's definition of a horse as, "Quadruped. Gramnivorus. Forty teeth, namely..." (You get the idea.) Meanwhile, there's a circus performer in the room who has "failed" the assignment, but she knows horses backwards and forwards, literally. Dickens wanted to show us that the Gradgrinds of his day (there really were such people in Dickens' time) missed something important about the nature of education.

Meanwhile, yesterday at skiing I heard some women discussing a hot (at the moment) WSJ article called "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." And today I saw that Cindy linked to the article, so I read it. I have many caveats about the article, especially that I think it's a publicity stunt, but I do know mothers who use the sorts of hard-nosed tactics Ms. Chua mentions. One could say, with some qualifications, that the Chinese mother (at least as defined by Ms. Chua), takes the Gradgrind approach: What counts is what's measurable, what's on the test. Creativity doesn't matter so much. Asking why something is on the test doesn't matter either. These are sidetracks that get in the way of success. Both the "Chinese mother" and Gradgrind are exaggerations, but useful ones in that they illuminate certain logical conclusions.

Our society is in a reaction to Gradgrind, even though it's a schizophrenic reaction. Today's "Western" parents are concerned with protecting their children's intellectual confidence. We don't tend to contradict our children. We don't tend to teach facts or memorization. We'd rather think we and our children are creative geniuses who don't have to memorize or work hard, but conquer the world through "critical thinking." (I put this in quotes because I think there is such a thing, but many exercises by the name don't really teach it.) Given the fear-based, teach-to-the-test pressure of high stakes tests, I really can sympathize with this reaction, but I think it goes too far. It often dispenses with facts altogether. We end up with the worst of both worlds, what Esolen calls "Gradgrind without the facts." Taken to this extreme, we end up with kids who neither understand the earthy essence of a horse, nor know how to describe one through definitional analysis.

What I'd like to propose, and what Esolen does propose, is going beyond the facts. Sometimes I am not so sure in my personal homeschooling journey which needs to come first, the work or the creative inspiration. In truth, I think we all go back and forth. But I'd let intrinsic motivation take a bigger part than either Gradgrind or Ms. Chua would (seriously or not) advocate.

I do see Ms. Chua's point that "nothing is fun until you're good at it." Some "Western" parents act as though they have no choice what their kids do, even if it hurts the kid in the long run. Sometimes you do have to lay down the law with a small child on matters behavioral and academic. But you can lay down the law in small doses, and (though it takes effort, and sometimes lots of effort) you can do it without the parental temper tantrums and guilt trips that Ms. Chua describes herself as having. A parent's job is to be a boundary, but a calm, kind one. And you don't have to emphasize success at all costs, or comparative success.

I also see Esolen's point that skills are tools. Much of twentieth and twenty-first century culture is a reaction to too much rote emphasis, but I think we are rediscovering belatedly (now that we've destroyed so much cultural capital) there is a place for skilled beauty. Cooking, carpentry, sports, academics, and yes, many of the arts, are richer if carried out with finely-honed mental and physical habits. In fact, many of my favorite activities are those that combine creativity with skill.

Esolen makes perhaps his best the point of the chapter under the section headed "Memory, What Memory?" He gives an anecdote about a farm boy in Saskatchewan who used to recite Paradise Lost as he plowed the fields. He then imagines a bureaucrat coming up to the boy, with the intention of arguing the boy out of his freedom. The boy, in turn, forms a moral response by remembering,

"So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear;

Farewell remorse, all good to me is lost;

Evil be thou my good: by thee at least

Divided empire with Heav'n's King I hold

By thee, and more than half perhaps shall reign,

As man ere long, and this new world shall know."

This is a student prepared to defend his liberty with a deep and calm confidence, because he has a true liberal arts education.

The extreme position that we have to have either facts or boundless individual freedom makes one of two errors: That a boy would memorize Milton only to make a good grade on a test and get into an Ivy League school, without stopping to think about what Milton has to say about liberty, or he disdains to memorize Milton at all, or even to read him, in which case the default is that he memorizes trivial bits of pop cultural trivia which, without his understanding why, signal his place as a cog in the wheel of the larger society. Either way, the student misses the larger, liberating point of education.

Esolen ends this section with the lyrics of a Rice-a-Roni commercial, while elsewhere John Taylor Gatto makes the same point by telling us that modern schools teach us that the difference between Coke and Pepsi is a subject worth arguing about (actually, my daughter's peers like to argue Mac vs. PC instead). The point is that we all talk about, learn about, worship, and even memorize something--it's just a matter of what.

One of the the more poignant versions of this Gradgrind-without-the-facts phenomenon I have seen was in a CVS pharmacy in Manhattan. The girl behind the counter who was checking me out was, as usual, having a conversation with her co-workers instead of paying attention to what she was doing at the register. Indeed, the job is rather boring, and I'm not sure I could resist zoning out sometimes myself. But the whole time she was checking me out, she was also reciting the lyrics to "Meet the Flintstones," in their entirety, to her friend. Even before reading Esolen, I couldn't help but think, "What if she had memorized Milton instead?"

This question had less to do with the so-called "Chinese" definition of success as defined by a Yale professor, even at that time, than it had to do with liberal education. Plowing is hard work, and possibly boring too, but who would you rather be, the boy in Saskatchewan or the girl in CVS?

Booklist for 2010

After the year ends, I like to take stock of the books I've read and think about which kinds were most worthwhile and which kinds I should probably read fewer of. I like to remember these books, just as I like to remember a good evening with friends. Because a good author is a kind of friend.

I didn't read as much this year as during the last several years. I'm pretty sure that there were two reasons: 1) I travelled a lot more, including three plane trips since October, and 2) This was the year that I started looking into colleges, and that is a very time-consuming activity. You'll notice that I haven't posted as much on this blog as usual, either. The causes are the same, no doubt.

Now, onto the books! This year sort of had a theme--ancient Roman history. The interest in Roman history started because I was researching for CZ's homeschooling this year, but it also had something to do with our trips to Italy. I wanted to understand any ruins we might see, and be able to explain something about them to CZ. While reading about Rome itself, I also got interested in the history of early Christianity and its relation to the later Roman Empire. I'm still reading about that. And I discovered that I liked the author Robert Louis Wilken, who apparently researched himself into belief, if I am reading correctly.

I found out from Susan Wise Bauer that you did not want to be next in line for a throne in the ancient world. Herod's Massacre of the Innocents was very much in character for his day.

On the lighter side, I read three Malcolm Gladwell books and two books by Anne Fadiman. The Gladwell books, frankly, ran together, but I got his main idea that one should look closely at a trend, because its causes may not be what you think (and several months after reading them, I'm wondering if they were really what he thinks, either). Outliers was the most memorable of the three books I read by Gladwell, but I also remember the anecdote about the Scots-Irish culture of honor being transported to the Appalachians, perhaps because I am probably at least partly from that background myself. Bob bought the book Albion's Seed, from which Gladwell took his chapter on Appalachian codes of honor.

The Fadiman books were just delightful. I don't care what Anne Fadiman writes about, I just like the way she describes things! But it helps that much of what she writes about has to do with books and words. I loved the essay, in Ex Libris, about long words that have gone out of use, and her game of surveying friends to see if they know them.

I found out through biography that Jonathan Edwards was a much different sort of man than I'd thought--very emotional in his faith, persecuted in his own day for his strong principles, and not the stiff Puritan often portrayed in American history classes. Yes, he is stern, but it's a sternness that arises out of passionate love.

Palace Walk, about an Egyptian Muslim family just before WWI, stood out as a fictional jewel in the middle of a largely non-fiction year. I might like to read the other two books in the trilogy.

I laughed all the way through An Italian Education, written by an Englishman (Tim Parks) who is married to an Italian and has raised his children (by now) in Verona. I had detected some of the curious Italian emphases he describes during my own two trips to Italy this year. Of course, he could have a similar heyday with Americans, and probably would if the field weren't so crowded with books already. My favorite scene was the one in which a German-speaking woman seals his identification with Italy by scolding him for irresponsibility (he's really just horribly sleep-deprived). But I was rather disappointed that the book ended at the beach in Pescara instead of in Verona. Perhaps Parks had to travel a bit to get the national character just right, but I left Parks' Italy feeling as though I had been watching one of those endless bikini shows on Univision.

When I look back over the reading year, my two most memorable books, I think, were Livy's The Early History of Rome, and Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. They are very different sort of books, and Esolen may be included partly because his is the last book I read this year, so it's still fresh.

The Early History of Rome was probably the most difficult book I read last year, not because of the sentence structure, but just because so many Romans shared the same few names! There was a continual parade of heroes and villains (though almost all were at least somewhat mixed in character) in this 400 year history, and I was constantly looking back to keep them all straight. But since I read it during a year in which I spent a lot of time in Italy, and I even read it partly in Italy (following the advice of Anne Fadiman that one should read in situ), it helped me understand what I was seeing, and helped me to connect Italy past and present. Early Rome was not the decadent place that later emperors like Nero ruled over, but it is also very different from the idealized image of the Republic that inspired the Founding Fathers and even a sculpture of George Washington in a toga. It's a sign of the book's value that I still remember exactly where I was (on a bus on Fifth Avenue, about to cross the park), when I read the arguments for and against opening the office of consul to plebians.

Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child is a new book, which I had pre-ordered because I like Esolen's posts on Mere Comments, and because the topic looked interesting. At first, it looks as though the book is going to be yet another one of those what's-wrong-with-modernity screeds that criticizes the status quo without saying contributing anything positive. The title is negative, and Esolen uses a lot of Lewis quotes, both of which are standard fare these days. Esolen even a Screwtape-like say-the-opposite-of-what-you-mean device that gets confusing at times because he seems to forget about it for pages at a stretch.

BUT--somehow in Esolen's able hands, the book emerges not as a strung together, poorly-reasoned rehash of Lewis anecdotes, Chestertonian paradox, and modernity-bashing, but as something positive and brightly inspiring. Esolen is a professor and translator of Dante, so his use of medieval poetry is especially effective. He doesn't just use Lewis's words, but captures a similar sense of longing. What do we have in our bland, flat, modern world that compares with the Brightest Heaven of Invention? Even the uneven Screwtape device ends up being effective, because it gives Esolen a chance to wax poetically on what he thinks used to be, and could be still, right with the world. Through it he shows that the problem with modernity isn't inherent in chronology or even in reform; the problem is lack of moral imagination. Today's anything-goes creativity is a poor substitute. Thus he reopens the window to the best of what the medieval world had to offer, without necessarily saying we have to go back to its (stereotyped) faults as well.

It probably helped that I was reading Esolen at my in-laws' home over Christmas. I'd look up from a chapter about letting boys play outside on their own, and about letting them be boys, and I'd see my thirteen-year-old nephew building a snow fort. He didn't have any other boys around that day (only his sister and CZ), but still, the kids were out for hours without regard for cold or dark, having a blast. A few days later I visited a friend whose seven-year-old son gets to roam around in the woods and spend "shop nights" with some other boys and a generous neighbor. Few boys get to have the sort of childhood that Esolen describes anymore, but our visit to Georgia seemed a demonstration that, even in an imperfect world, there are still opportunities for the sort of freedom that builds imagination.

Here's the full list for 2010:

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie

Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry

Night, Elie Wiesel

Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Robert Louis Wilken

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

Palace Walk, Naguib Mafouz

The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography, Iain H. Murray

Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman

The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Plutarch

At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman

A Student's Guide to the Classics, Bruce Thornton (2nd reading)

Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children

The Early History of Rome, Livy

The History of the Ancient World, Susan Wise Bauer

Cities of God, Rodney Stark

The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (3rd reading)

The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education, Maya Frost

An Italian Education, Tim Parks

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen

How I choose what to read next

I can tell this photo of our bookshelf is old, because we have more books now and our framed photos are different.  Isn't it funny how an old photo of a bookshelf is almost like a scrapbook?

I love the moment when I get to pick out a new book.  I do it kinesthetically, by making a stack. Usually I have a mental list, but it changes.  And I usually have more than one book going at a time, so there's a certain undefined number of them that I have to finish in order to allow myself the privilege of making a new stack.

Yesterday was one of those "make the stack" moments, though.  I've finished my biography of Jonathan Edwards, and I finished a nice little light book by Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris) that indulged my eccentricity. So it was just the right moment to wallow in books.

Though my shelving system is eccentric, I usually know where my books are.  First I went to the bedroom to fetch The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I plan to read this one mostly in the mornings along with my Bible.  

Then I climbed up on one of the chairs and started taking books down off the classical shelf (5C--our shelving system is modeled after our apartment building, with floors and units).  When Bob came into the room, I was standing in my socks on a narrow ledge, holding a volume of Plutarch in one hand and Alfred the Great in the other.  They both made the trip down with me.  They are both of a good subway book size and weight.  

Then I remembered that I'd been meaning to read David McCullough's 1776 for forever.  Someone had given us a deluxe version, a slip-covered coffee-table book with facsimile documents in vellum envelopes.  It's really fun to look through all the documents, but unfortunately, the sheer size of the book has probably kept me from ever seriously trying to read it.  So yesterday I moved it from the shelf to the coffee table, which we didn't even have when I got the book.  

On the way back down to the chair, I spied Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children lying sideways on top of the other books in the "history/mostly source material" shelf (2B), because I'd run out of room on that shelf.  Oh, that too!  I grabbed it.  (Grabbing books while pivoting to step down, in sock feet, from a narrow wooden ledge is not something I'd recommend, but this time I got away with it.)  

So there's my little stack.  I'm in a history mood.  And I also have David Hicks' Norms and Nobility going, but I forgot to include it in the photo above. I'm not sure I'll read every one of the books in the stack, but they're easy to get to now, and I started three of them (Bonhoeffer, Plutarch, and Teddy Roosevelt) today.  They're very different books, for different situations, so I'll likely enjoy all three.  

In addition to the stacks, I have another informal rule for choosing books.  I try, somehow, to loosely rotate lighter books with more challenging ones, and fiction with non-fiction.  Non-fiction usually wins out overall, but I'm trying to balance them more than I once did.  And of course, some days I'll just pick up a cookbook or a reference book and spend a couple of hours perusing that.  

***

So what are the Shakespeare books doing in the photo? Those are Bob's books.  

Bob is a completely different sort of book chooser than I am.  He is very goal-oriented.  He plans out his reading, often down to the number of pages per day, several books in advance, and then works methodically through his own plan.  In addition, he reads every issue of The New Criterion, cover to cover, before the next issue arrives.  He gets through some very difficult books this way, like N.T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God, or the Landmark Herodotus.  (He got the idea for reading the latter from The New Criterion, which is a hazard of reading that magazine.)  He got through vet school and law school this way, too.  

Right now he has Shakespeare at the top of his stack, because Shakespeare in the Park season is coming up, and he dutifully assigns himself each play before we go see it.  This year the plays are The Merchant of Venice and The Winter's Tale.  

Will I get around to reading Shakespeare?  I don't know--I am, honestly, a flittier reader than Bob is.  But I get through a lot, I challenge myself, and I bond with my books.  (I have my own system of margin notes and underlining.)  I think we each have each found a method of reading that suits us.

N.T. Wright at Redeemer (notes)

Our family went to hear N.T. Wright speak last night at Redeemer. I'm going to post my notes here because I sense many connections to the Norms and Nobility conversation going on at Ordo Amoris, especially the Russell Kirk article that Dana posted, "Can Virtue Be Taught?" Since I am not able to write much on Norms and Nobility, perhaps these notes can be my contribution to the conversation.

This talk was on Bishop Wright's new book, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. I haven't read the book yet, because Bob is still reading our copy (we only purchased it recently). But he said that the talk was a good indicator of the contents of the book.

Bishop Wright has a very winsome presence, and this talk inspired me to hope and joy. I mention this because when I read Surprised by Hope a couple of years ago, I was ever so slightly annoyed that he seemed convinced that the average Christian has a no clue that there are two stages after death, thinks that this physical world is bad, and that heaven is somewhere ethereal to which we escape. I don't find this to be the case, but then, I may not know as much about the state of Christian belief as he does. At any rate, hearing Bishop Wright's tone in person dispelled any such misgivings immediately. The man is humble and funny, and better yet, sincerely delighted in the Lord.

Also, because I know that in some circles there are questions about Bishop Wright's commitment to salvation by grace, I will add that he emphasized that everything he says follows from grace, and in no way negates it. He had some clear and inspiring ways of making his point, but I may not have written them down as clearly as I should have. He did have a mild disagreement with Luther (see below), but it is possible to have a mild disagreement with Luther and believe in salvation by grace.

And finally, since I pulled myself off the sofa during a mild stomach virus to attend this talk, and since I was sitting only four rows from the front and didn't want to be constantly scribbling with my pen, my note-taking may have been a bit sub par. As always with notes, it's possible that I have missed something, or worse, misrepresented it. I haven't checked every scripture reference. And where something doesn't seem to be quite clear in my notes, I've filled in the sense of it from memory. Still, I hope this post gets the main points across.

***

When people talk about virtue, they usually approach it using philosophical texts, such as Aristotle, rather than the New Testament.

The tendency in our age is to criticize Christianity as legalistic because we would rather be spontaneous, authentic selves. But Christianity doesn't obliterate our God-given personalities. In 2 Corinthians 5, "more fully clothed" means that we are only a shadow of our future true selves, which will be facets of God's glory. Evil makes you a clone. The difference between God's way and the world's way is that we find this self by dying.

Aristotle's vision for the statesman was to cultivate four virtues: courage, justice, temperance, and prudence. They were like mental muscles that had to be exercised until they became second nature. This kind of character was the goal (or telos) of the statesman's education.

We become what we do. Anyone can learn a vice; all we have to do is slide along. Building character takes purposeful effort. Courage is developed with a thousand small decisions to put someone else's well-being before our own. These small decisions form a habit that holds when tested, as it did for Capt. Sullenberger when he landed a plane in the Hudson.

You can see from this example that virtue is not just following a bunch of legalistic rules. If Capt. Sullenberger had been an individualist or legalist, he would never have been able to react as gracefully as he did in an emergency. He would still have been consulting page 300 of the flight manual as the plane plunged into the Hudson. (He said this with a twinkle.)

Luther thought Catholic virtue was hypocrisy. The drift of modern Western thought is in agreement.

There was a large overlap between Christian virtue and the Greek. (He addresses this more fully below, and also during the Q & A.)

So what is our purpose (telos) here during this life, and in the New Heavens and the New Earth? We are supposed to be a royal priesthood. All Christians will share creative rule over the New Earth.

Aristotle's vision of character was for fine individuals to lead in battle. The Christian vision is corporate. (My note: Not in a business sense, but in the Christian sense, as in the Body of Christ. Americans have changed the meaning of the word to the point where it affects the way we run our churches.) Repeated behavior physically changes your brain (he mentioned a study that showed that the hippocampus of a London cabby was larger than that of most people because it contained a well-developed mental map of the city). Christian character should also change the brain.

(The following paragraph is one I'm not quite sure I got right.)

Modern Western (which Bishop Wright calls Romantic) thought is a reaction to Utilitarianism (or Consequentialism), the idea of trying to calculate which pragmatic action will bring the best outcome for the largest number of people possible. The problem with Utilitarianism is that we can't possibly calculate all the unintended consequences of our pragmatic actions. The Romantic reaction to Utilitarianism is that everything should be spontaneous. Unfortunately, Romanticism can lead to chaos. Also, spontaneity is itself a principle, so it contradicts its own philosophy. One can't decide spontaneously to be spontaneous.

The whole creation praises God, but only humans can add "because."

Some Christians start out thinking they have a calling, but they give up at the first difficulty, because it requires effort. They think effort isn't Christian because the Holy Spirit is supposed to work automatically. Often the way the Holy Spirit works, however, is by calling you to character. Grow up in your thinking; don't give up at the first resistance. 1 Corinthians 13 talks about past, present and future. "Put away childish thinking." Love is not our duty but our destiny. Hope is not merely optimism, but trust in the God of the future.

Galatians 5 on the fruit of the Spirit. Those led by the Spirit are not under the law. We misunderstand. We reject the ontology of rules, so we miss opportunities for growth. But the fruit does not grow automatically. (I think he means that by calling any attempt at self-discipline legalism, we miss opportunities for building character by the Spirit.)

New Christian life does bring dramatic change, especially at first, but we also need to tend and prune the tree in order to mature.

The list of fruit ends in self-control. The other characteristics on the list are easily counterfeit-able, but self-control is not. But the list is characteristics of the fruit of the Spirit, not a list of different fruits. Without self-control, the other characteristics are suspect. They all go together. (It's not like the lists of spiritual gifts that Paul uses.)

Joy is not happiness, but the fruit of settled conviction in the resurrection of Jesus. Joy springs from something that happened in space/time reality.

Christian virtues of the ancient world were: patience, humility, chastity, charity. The ancient pagan world didn't have much use for these. The pagans purposely cultivated pride. Christian character does make us better citizens, but we don't collude with the world. Instead we reflect the love of Christ. We collaborate without compromise. We critique without Dualism.

Q & A:

What are the first steps one should take to cultivate virtue?

You want to start the opposite of a vicious cycle, a virtuous cycle. Read the Scripture--sometimes in detail and sometimes as a whole. Also, read stories of men and women of faith (example, Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who quickly substituted himself for a family man who was going to be executed in a concentration camp).

Then bring it into the Body:

The person and the community do not cancel one another out; only the individual and the collective do. New Yorkers will have to work harder at community than the English, who have been settled in their parishes for generations. (Yes!) They will also have to work harder at keeping different kinds of people in their fellowship.

How to you keep virtue from reverting into legalism?

(His answer has to do with the purpose of the Law, which isn't sufficient in itself.) The Law is like a crash barrier. It stops you from doing something disastrous, but you still need to learn how to drive well. Legalism is an attitude that can creep into anything, even our efforts not to be legalistic.

What are the similarities and differences between our idea of virtue and that of those who don't believe?

There is a lot of overlap. We all know certain things in our bones, but also that we don't live up to them. "Press on toward the goal" is virtue language. (I didn't do a very good job writing this one down.)

What are your own disciplines?

Bible reading and prayer. The Psalms are the backbone. They run the gamut of emotional experiences, and they encourage you to pray. C.S. Lewis said Psalm 19 was the greatest poem ever written.

Also the sacraments.

Could you speak on the role of suffering in creating virtue?

Christians had had various traditions of suffering, such as flagellation, but regardless, suffering will come and find you. Romans 8 speaks to suffering. The Corinthians were ashamed of Paul because he suffered. When you suffer, you only realize in retrospect what you've learned from it. That suffering has beneficial aspects is often counter-intuitive to young, successful people.

What is the Holy Spirit's role in character development over time?

Read 1 Corinthians 15 and Colossians 1. There is a paradox of the Spirit. The Spirit may tell our minds that we should do certain things, and then we follow up. We don't possess the Spirit; the Spirit possesses us. But we can create favorable conditions for the Spirit, as a gardener does for his plants. Jesus said we don't see the Spirit, but we know he has come. His workings are mysterious.

What is the role of worship in creating virtue?

Read Revelations 4-5 as a description of worship. You become what you worship.

What is the difference between the Christian virtue of love and the pagan one?

Love wasn't a primary virtue for Aristotle. It was lower on the list. One does see love in the letters of Cicero, for example. But pagan love has no sense of obligation to those outside one's own family or social class. In Christianity, love centers on the gospel.

Books for 2009

I strongly believe that the number of books one reads in a year is less relevant than what one remembers of them by the end of it. So, what do I remember of my reading for 2009?

I read more fiction and narrative than usual, so vivid images and characters remain in my mind: A childlike man rowing a boat on a lake as he imagines his own magical and unsupportable reality, and another lying injured and exposed on an arctic plateau for months. A woman whose impetuosity is polished by faith into courage as she suffers from the echoes of a youthful indiscretion. Because much of my fiction this year had a Norwegian or Scandinavian setting, I imagine scenes of sunlight slanting wanly on snowy mountains in winter, tiny isolated villages in which the women knit and the men ski and cut wood, with echoes loneliness and paganism.

As for the non-fiction I'm realizing that it takes a lot these days to make a light, topical book like In Defense of Food or Under Pressure memorable for me. I've been reading this type of book for so long now that many of the principles in them are running together. They are good principles, but these books often originate as good journalistic essays which are then expanded beyond their scope and don't satisfy as full-length books. Still, they usually read fast, and I like the genre that tries to make some sense of modern life in its current iterations, so I will continue to look for good examples. I wonder, though, how much our present publishing practices are to blame for watered down topical non-fiction.

Paul Johnson's history books, despite being 1000 pages each, are never an example of watered-down writing. Johnson's strength is presenting broad themes amidst thousands of details and biographical anecdotes. From A History of the American People I remember in particular the image of Thomas Jefferson at his desk as President, available to take on any and all visitors. That is about as clear a picture of how our country has changed during its history as any I can imagine.

And then there are the classics. I always try to read a few each year. Some of them were hard to get through in doctors' waiting rooms or in between homeschooling and homemaking, but even if they aren't "fun" at the time, they leave an impression that is worth the effort. Most of them should be read again, but realistically, I know that not all of them will be.

I had to take the end of Augustine's Confessions one sentence at a time. It was almost pure philosophy, but produced a state of mind that was clear and appreciative of every elementary aspect of existence.

Shakespeare is, well, Shakespeare. Seeing his plays produced in Central Park is one of the highlights of our summer, so one or all of us usually reads the featured play. This year I'm really enjoying my new HEM CD of the songs from Twelfth Night, as performed in the Delacorte Theatre production this summer. And CZ is playing them on her fiddle and new Irish flute. Last night we got to talking about how so many of the song lyrics in this comedy are about mortality. Thinking about the whole scope of life while the play leads up to a wedding is surprisingly invigorating and moving, not morbid.

What I appreciated most about The Education of Henry Adams was his first person accounts of the events and people of his time, related not from the 30,000 foot perspective of history, but seemingly as they were unfolding. (This was not actually the case, because he wrote the book many years after the most of the events, but his descriptions are still fresh.) His philosophy seemed cynical, more obscure, and was somewhat lost on me. I read up on it in Wikipedia, but it didn't interest me as much as the historical vignettes.

I was startled at the transparent arrogance and childishness of James Watson in The Double Helix. People should read this book only if to realize that famous scientists aren't always the superheroes that we make them out to be. But I learned a something about chemistry, too.

Uncle Tom's Cabin wasn't about an obsequious slave as I'd been led to believe. It was about a man with strong Christian faith, but the writing was almost so sentimental as to detract from Tom's piety. I read this book only out of solidarity, because CZ had to read it over Christmas for a class. But I'm glad I did, because I had misunderstood the book.

And then there's I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which makes the excellent point that people should probably carefully consider what their motives are in dating when they're nowhere near ready to marry. I could hardly get through the intensity of Harris's writing; It makes me glad I'm not twenty-one anymore. But the longer I live, the more I thank God for my husband and also realize that Harris is basically right.

Here's the full list. I have decided to make this a yearly tradition, because it gives me somewhere to put the list that's usually growing on my sidebar during the year:

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes, Kenneth Myers (second time)

An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Lord of the Flies, William Golding

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

Confessions, St. Augustine

Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

Chance, Joseph Conrad

Montaigne, Selected Essays, "On the Education of Children" (not whole book)

Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, Sigrid Undset

Keeping House, Margaret Kim Peterson

Mindset, Carol Dweck

Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto (second time)

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wife, Sigrid Undset

Under Pressure, Carl Honore

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross, Sigrid Undset

Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford

Nightbirds on Nantucket, Joan Aiken

A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

The Education of Henry Adams

Distracted, Maggie Jackson

The Birds, Tarjei Vesaas

Do Hard Things, Alex and Brett Harris

For the Children's Sake, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Memoir on Pauperism, by Alexis de Tocqueville (booklet)

A History of the American People, Paul Johnson

We Die Alone, David Howarth

Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper

Hundred Dollar Holiday, Bill McKibben

ISI Student Guides, various authors and lengths

The Snoring Bird, Bernd Heinrich

I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Double Helix, James Watson

Reading on the train

Today's NY Times published an article about what people read while riding on the subway. You might even recognize one of the people interviewed, though the reporter didn't quite get the reasoning right, or the quote. Maybe she was subtly influenced by those Rosetta Stone ads.

(Update: I guess I was a little too mysterious here. The reason I posted this article is that Bob is quoted in the article because he was studying Rosetta Stone on the subway. The writer imagined that he might be studying Italian in order to go meet a fiance's parents in Tuscany. The truth of the matter is that he didn't want to be the only person in New York City who didn't speak two languages!)

I really liked the journal idea in the article.

I like watching others read on the train. Many people read the free subway paper or a tabloid, play video games, listen to music I can hear too well on their iPods, or compose text messages, but you'd be surprised at the variety. This week I saw a young man trying stand astride and read while balancing Infinite Jest. It would never had worked except that he was somewhere in the middle of the book. I saw a woman with a book that started on the right, mouthing prayers in another language. No head scarf, black hose, black skirt--Hebrew, I think. Another trip to Jamaica Bay yielded a teenager in a beach coverup, absorbed in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter. (A clever psychological tactic, perhaps?) Some older Hispanic women read tracts, in Spanish, of course. Sometimes the books are so esoteric that I'm surprised the reader can concentrate. Lots of people study on their way to class, including a young man who was obviously cramming algebra II on the way to his Regents Exam last June. I've seen teachers grading papers, and C.Z. always gets curious when she notices someone with an orchestral score. (If you peek over someone's shoulder, you are supposed to at least be discreet.) I see lots of Michael Pollan, books about Obama, Eat, Pray, Love, or whatever is popular. When the movies come out, sometimes I see Narnia or Harry Potter.

I didn't read at all on the train until recently, because I had a non-reading child in tow (C.Z. claimed she couldn't concentrate on a crowded train). But during last week's leisurely hour-and-a-half commute to Jamaica Bay, I ploughed through the end of Tarjei Vesaas' The Birds, while C.Z. read the first several chapters of Pride and Prejudice. And a couple of weeks before, a woman asked me if I liked Kristin Lavransdatter. Perhaps a new era has begun.

Henry Adams on the Prussian educational system

Still reading The Education of Henry Adams. Last night I ran across these interesting passages, written about Adam's stay, as a recent Harvard grad, in Berlin. As context, Adams had gone to Germany to study law, but quickly realized that he was in over his head in the university, so he enrolled in a regular "high school" school with twelve and thirteen-year-olds to learn the language instead:

Bismarck himself was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the German system. The condition of Germany was a scandal and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great public school to get educated, at precisely the time when the Germans wanted most to get rid of the education they were forced to follow...

...one could at least say in defence of the German school that it was neither very brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was excellent in his Prussian way, and the other instructors were not worse then in other schools; it was their system that struck the systemless American with horror. The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was pathetic...

They never breathed fresh air; they had never heard of a playground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted in winter into an inhabited building; in the school every room was tightly closed and had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all decency but when the American opened a window in the five minutes between hours, he violated he rules and was invariably rebuked. As long as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the boys had a holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the Thiergarten or elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue, tobacco-smoke, sausage, and beer. With this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they could learn only because their minds were morbid. The German university had seemed a failure, but the German high school was something very near and indictable nuisance.

Adams seems to have had an amazing knack for being in the right place at the right time, possibly because he had the fortune (for good or ill) to be born into a very influential family. At any rate, he seems to be describing, first hand, the very educational system that Bostonians Horace Mann and Adams's own relative, Governor of Massachusetts Edward Everett, had just introduced into the United States as its first public school system. (Reading this, I'm not sure they succeeded entirely, but they did make some headway.) John Taylor Gatto and others, of course, have had plenty to say about the Prussian system elsewhere, but I thought it worth sharing this vivid first hand account.

The Education of Henry Adams

I've been meaning to read The Education of Henry Adams for a long time, and I've finally waded in. I don't think it's going to go very quickly, but I think I'll be glad I've read it.

Henry Adams was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams. He grew up in what he calls an "18th century" Boston, one that still lived in the atmosphere of the Boston Tea Party. As I read, I am amazed that how many influential streams branch out of the Boston of that time (Longfellow, Emerson, Webster, Horace Mann, etc.), and how many seem to have been personally acquainted with the Adams family. What a way to grow up! Yet I gather by the tone of the book that Adams felt that his childhood prepared him poorly for his life, as he looked back on it in the early 20th century.

Was he right? I can't tell, at least not yet. In one early passage, he expresses surprise at the impotence of the Boston Unitarianism in which he was raised. The atmosphere in which he grew up was not only devoid of strong theology, but also of interest in philosophy. Only literature and politics remained worth discussing. Through his eyes, one gets a picture of an American city which has thrown off what the Old World had to offer, but doesn't know how to embrace the new, either. I guess I'll find out more as I read.

In the second chapter Henry Adams gives an appraisal of his schoolboy education. That's why I'm posting about the book--because this passage interested me. Although he says "the boy" throughout this quote as though he means it generally, it soon becomes evident that he's talking about himself in particular:

Home influences alone never saved a New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the dayschool of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. He memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.

In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German and Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school...

...Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction very day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.

Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen were worse than none. [Here he names many amusements common at the time.] From none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out--Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest---they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Dcouments in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.

Considering how generally negative Adams is, I'm not sure we should take his word as wisdom, but as a firsthand description of the extraordinary life to which he was born, the Education is very interesting reading.

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann is a book I pull out now and then to remind myself of certain things I perceive to be true, but don't often hear stated openly. Father Schmemman was a Russian Orthodox priest who loved his church, country (Russia), and adopted countries (France and the U.S.) greatly, but was also honest to himself about their problems. Father Schmemann's journals are also full of intimate and loving comments about his family, close friends, and the weather. These latter are all ordinary sorts of observations, but they made the journals very personal, and after you've read a number of them, you feel glad to have known Father Schmemann through his writing.

Some of my favorite passages are brief notes about clouds, or a one sentence mention of a friend. Here's a typical example from the beginning of the book:

"I spent the whole morning at home. After a week in California, after the feast in Wilkes-Barre (consecration of Bishop Herman), after a trip to Philadelphia (funeral of Ivan Czap). What pure joy! Working in the dining room is Tom Hopko [later his son-in-law], with whom I always feel the presence of light and goodness. Snow outside my window."

See what I mean? All it takes to make him (and me, which is why I like this book) happy is a bit of rest at home, a friend or two in whose presence one can feel comfortable, and the ability to notice his natural surroundings.

Yet here are two observations about Americans in churches that I came across this morning:

Nowadays, especially in the U.S., the Church is perceived as an enterprise, an activity. The priest constantly harasses people to do something for the Church. And their activism is measured in quantitative criteria: how many meetings, how much money, how much "doing." I'm not sure it is all necessary. What is dangerous is not the activity itself, but the reduction of the Church, the identification of this activity with life in the Church."

and these fragmented notes after a meeting with a seminarian:

Pathological fear of not being popular, of falling out of the social micro-organism to which one belongs. How much in America depends on pseudo-friendship, pseudo-interest in each other, on a sort of ritual, symbolical unity. All of it comes from a pathological fear of being alone, even for a short time. There is so little inner life in people in these times. It is stifled by this necessity to be "with it." And when an inner life manages to break through, man is seized by total panic and rushes to some analyst....The reason is the pursuit from childhood of an adjusted life. People are taught about it in their family, in kindergarten, in school and in college, so that any falling out of the established "socium" is perceived as a threatening symptom of maladjustment, demanding an immediate cure. I often ask myself--even wrote about it: Why is there so much tension at the seminary? The answer is simple, I think. Because everyone lives depending on the other. They think it's Christian love. But it's neither Christian, nor love. It is a selfish concern and fear about one's self; a fear of not having a witness in the other, a confirmation of one's own existence.

Now it's not quite fair of me to quote these two criticisms in the midst of a book that has so much to say that's positive and loving. It may give an impression that is disproportionate. And so might my commentary. But I do think that these criticisms, made in 1982, still hold for many churches. I think they apply to modern education, too. And they are especially telling next to his positive comments about secure relationships and home life.

Since we got back from our trip to Georgia, I've been mostly by myself--that is to say, I've not sought out any social events--and I've really enjoyed the quiet. Now that it's finally calm at home, C.Z. has been entertaining herself quite well with various interests, and sometimes we go out to a museum or a park together for a change of scenery. She's also been biking with Bob (I don't have a bike yet).

I've been surrounded by people the whole time, of course. One always is in Manhattan. I interact with grocery clerks and people at the farmers' market, Audubon volunteers, our summer violin teacher, neighbors I see in the hallway, and our doormen, and we shake hands with the people around us at church. I had one phone call from a local friend about some plans, and left a message for another just to catch up. I've gotten some group e-mails and corresponded a bit privately, and Bob and I have spoken to our parents on a regular basis. My point is that, if I didn't seek people out actively by joining things, my life might easily continue on like this indefinitely. Would that be so bad? Is it Christian enough?

It's not that I mind doing things for others, or being with others, including new acquaintances. Sometimes I enjoy it very much. But if the atmosphere around me seems to place a primary emphasis on activity, and my ordinary life doesn't bring me into close contact with others, it's really no wonder that I enjoy being alone. I'm not going to go out and seek company just to measure up to someone else's idea of a well-adjusted life. No, I think I'll stay home and pray instead, and see what God has for me. It could eventually be an activity, just not right now.

Thanks Susan for recommending this book. You're welcome to sit at my dining room table (such as it is) anytime!

Shop Class as Soulcraft

During the past week or two I've been reading Matthew Crawford's new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. I bought the book because I read a link from Rick Saenz's blog to an article of the same name in The New Atlantis.

I'll tentatively say that I think this book makes a successful leap from article to full length book. I think there are a couple of reasons for this: One is that Crawford has a background in philosophy, and the book balances philosophy with nuts and bolts throughout. While reading, I picked up references to ideas that I'd read in C.S. Lewis, as well as a host of lesser books on classical education. The flavor is vaguely Aristotelian, if I understand Aristotle right. I'm not a scholar.

The other, I think, is that Crawford isn't primarily a journalist. He repairs motorcycles, and enjoys doing so. (He also has a job with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, which he seems to truly enjoy, unlike his earlier think tank job.) I think he's genuinely writing out of an imperative to know, so his book has something of a searching feel. I've read so many books that feel very formulaic to me--anecdotes strung together with a thin veneer of ideas. Whatever the book's faults, I think Crawford is not too glib.

That said, I felt a slight disorganization in the book. This could be because I read it in snatches, and because I'd already read the two essays/articles which are interspersed throughout the book. (A link to the second one is posted below.) And while sometimes he uses just the right words, at others he uses a lot of extra ones. This doesn't kill the interest for me, though. I'd probably like to reread it later and see what I think then.

On the face of it, Shop Class seems to be an apology for the manual trades. Most of the examples are taken from Crawford's own work as a motorcycle mechanic. (Replete with macho, as opposed to manly, talk.) But as Crawford himself says, he's not trying to get more people to become blue-collar workers; he's trying to get them to examine the received wisdom that a white collar is the key to having a job that requires thought. The book is really about how modern capitalism has separated thought from production in office jobs, resulting in a work place where no one is truly accountable for what is produced.

Some have criticized the book for unrealistically glorifying manual labor at the expense of office work, and that Crawford is a special, somehow privileged case, in having a career that spans both extremes. Well, I don't know, but I'm frankly glad someone has tried it--it's not like everyone is going to want to! These criticisms sound to me an awful lot like people who won't homeschool because not everyone does.

The reason for the mechanical anecdotes, of course, is that they add credibility to his arguments about the nature of work. I don't know the guy's whole background or how he happened to study philosophy as well as the manual trades, but it's obvious that he really does like fixing motorcycles. And I find myself hoping that he really is good at it, and not just waxing poetic, because his whole thesis seems to hang on it. I think of people I know who can talk about paintings, but can't paint. There's a lot of insight in the nitty gritty.

I don't want to try to encompass the whole book in my review, but I would like to list some points that struck me as I read, either because they were new ideas or because they made connections between things I had already thought about in other contexts:

One of the most Orwellian chapters of the book was "The Contradictions of the Cubicle." He tells the basic story in an article that was recently published in the New York Times: With his advanced degree, he once procured a nightmarish cubicle job writing abstracts for academic articles. The setup of the job was totally ill-suited for the day to day work in a way that can only happen when the upper-level managers are more concerned with efficiency than the work itself. (Think tech support.) One guy was even narcotizing his feelings of absurdity by doing heroin on the job.

Crawford uses this as an example of the futility of credential inflation. In a section of the chapter called "What College is For," he writes:

[In the push for increased college attendance] there is little accommodation to the diversity of dispositions, and of the fact that some very smart people are totally ill suited both to higher education and to the kind of work you're supposed to do once you have a degree. Further, funneling everyone into college creates certain perversities in the labor market...My very existence, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futureologist in a rapture; we are getting to be so smart! Yet in viewing my situation from afar in this way, the M.A. degree serves only to obscure a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential...Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?

Until after WWII, lots of business jobs didn't require a college degree. Now we have degrees for technicians. When the college push first started a couple of generations ago, at least colleges selected for a certain self-discipline, but now recruiters are looking more for a certain type of personality. That's why the extracurriculars have become so important. They show that one is a joiner, ready for teamwork. And higher education habituates people to a certain disconnect between rhetoric and reality. That also suits the office environment.

(For what it's worth, I have worked in a cubicle before, so I have some experience with what he's talking about. But since my job was in design, at least I went to construction sites, and my measurements had to add up.)

Elsewhere in this chapter Crawford describes example after example of management techniques that are at some times reminiscent of girl cliques and at others almost remind me of Communist "re-education" camps. The point of this chapter is that "teamwork" is a vague and contentless concept that is necessarily manipulative because in a consumer-driven culture, there are no objective standards.

A good part of the [management] job, then consists of "a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone, especially oneself.

[In the context of teamwork]...authority becomes passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism. It is always pretending to be in your best interest, in everyone's best interest, as rationality itself.

The risk is of being deceived into thinking there is a common good where there is not one.

In contrast with teamwork is "solidarity," which is based on concrete common interests.

Solidarity with others is a positive attraction, akin to love... Its scope is necessarily smaller, its grip on our affections tighter, than that of any vaporous universal.

Another helpful chapter is entitled "Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement." Crawford posits the example of a mortgage broker whose work is not intrinsically satisfying, so he works hard to earn money for a vacation to Mount Everest, where he can feel the satisfaction of confronting a concrete, unyielding Reality. At the turn of the last century, such a banker would have possessed a community to give context and accountability to his work. He would have gone down to the local hardware store to ask the owner how likely a potential borrower was to pay back his account there, and he would have considered the good of his community as a whole if he lent the man money. By contrast (which is obvious now, but wasn't to many people as little as three or four years ago), the 21st Century mortgage system is set up to discourage accountability altogether. Not only does the mortgage broker not know his borrowers, he has no incentive to find out--not from his brokerage, which wants to rack up origination fees and immediately sells the mortgage to a third party, or from Wall Street, which wants to profit from a lending boom.

This example, of course, makes me wonder whether Crawford wrote these chapters before the mortgage bubble burst or afterwards, but banking isn't the only industry structured this way. Our entire economy is structured to discourage reality checks. This not only leads to temporary setbacks like foreclosure and housing busts, but prevents most workers, white collar or blue, from being able to work in a job that makes sense, even in the most prosperous of economic times.

At the end of the book Crawford conducts a very interesting discussion about the difference between being independent and being autonomous. I think this is a distinction that Christians would do well to recognize, just as they recognize three Greek words for "love." One frequently hears pastors extol community and preach against hyper-individualism, and I understand why. There are extreme tendencies in our society that, if followed, could lead to each person isolating himself from God and neighbor in his or her own private Hell. But sometimes our solutions, couched in management speak, produce something more like a corporate "encounter session" than hard won faith in an Incarnated God, or community with particular people who share specific tasks.

In light of this, I like to remember that there is also a form of independence or healthy skepticism, perhaps better termed human dignity, that protects people from false intimacy. Orthodox Christianity contains the right balance, the best of both individual freedom and thoughtful community, but sometimes we Christians veer to one side of the road or another in our attempts to live it out.

Here's how Crawford puts it:

[A journeyman's] individuality is...expressed in an activity that, in answering to a shared world, connects him to others: the customers he serves and other practitioners of his art, who are competent to recognize the peculiar excellence of his work. Such a sociable individuality contrasts with the self-enclosure that is implicit in the idea of "autonomy," which means giving a law to oneself. The idea of autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings; one upon another, and each on a world that is not of our making.

To live wakefully is to live in full awareness of this, our human situation. To live well is to reconcile ourselves to it, and try to realize whatever excellence we can. For this some economic conditions are more favorable than others. When the conception of work is removed from the scene of its execution, we are divided against one another, and each against himself...A humane economy would be one in which the possibility of acheiving such satisfaction is not foreclosed ahead of time for most people. It would require a sense of scale. We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power...But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, to to take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible (it is never guaranteed). The consolation we seek in shopping serves only to narcotize us against a recognition of the facts, even while contributing to the Giant Pool of Money.

Crawford isn't speaking from a Christian point of view, but this Christian would like to live closer to the way he describes.