What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Don't Fence Me In

(Great minds must think alike. I was already thinking about this post before Jeff put up his previous one.)

A Western song goes like this:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.
...
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in.

I've heard it said that the American pioneer spirit is the enemy of civilization and "community," and I suppose the cowboy spirit expressed here would be even more so. The focus on freedom is, in contemporary jargon, "in your face." I would guess that no woman, in particular, can hear old Bing sing "Don't Fence Me In" without raising her eyebrows. "Oh, yeah, buddy? You ever want to be married? Have children? Is that hobbles and fences? You're going to have to settle down sometime or die alone, and we'll see how you like that."

We ought to see the relationship between the "Don't Fence Me In" masculine spirit and the civilizing female spirit as one of those never-ending fruitful tensions that enrich the world. Destroying the tension by eliminating the feminine role gets you not cowboys but gangstas. (And, to add to the complexity, gangstas are often created in an over-feminized environment full of female-headed homes which nonetheless are incapable of exercising the true feminine role of domesticating the male.) Destroying the tension by eliminating the masculine, freedom-loving side gets you Big Nanny Janet Napolitano and her sheep-making crew.

Right now, we are getting the worst of both worlds. Chivalry is dead, and the last vestiges of the proper American hatred of the stupid stiflement of all-encompassing regulations and government intrusiveness is dying. We have become comfortable, and I notice that the stories about outrage at the TSA are less frequent. Lord willing, when Congress comes back into session it will "do something" about the matter, but if it doesn't, I fear Americans will simply submit. Many people would say, understandably enough, "What else can I do?" If one's livelihood depends on flying, the sheep-makers have a headlock.

But we didn't get here all at once. We got here by gradually losing the cowboy spirit, the pioneering spirit, and the rightful disdain for "show me your papers," "sign here," "how much cholesterol does that meal contain?" and "do you have a license to sell those brownies?" The old women, male and female, have taken over, and increasingly, there is no more frontier and nowhere simply to carry out one's life without its every tiniest aspect being overseen and regulated for Our Own Good.

So color me sympathetic to the American cowboys, even if they sound a bit anarchic at times. If their side of it is an important part of a fruitful dialogue, we need to hear that voice, whether we agree with everything it says or not, when it rages against the emasculating of a once proud people, of once proud men. Otherwise, I fear, we will rapidly cease to be a free people in any sense at all.

Comments (49)

Lydia, the man who made the song famous was Roy Rogers. Irving Berlin, the song's author, asked RR to be the first one to sing it.

You may be interested in a couple of reprints from Dover Publications:

- The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner - a 1920 collection of his best papers on the frontier: http://store.doverpublications.com/0486473317.html

- Daniel Boone's Own Story & The Adventures of Daniel Boone - especially good for read-aloud time with the kids - http://store.doverpublications.com/0486476901.html

~~I've heard it said that the American pioneer spirit is the enemy of civilization and "community"~~

Only when taken to an extreme. Remember that the purpose of pioneering is to settle eventually. The flip side of this is the fact that we can become too settled. Hence the tension.

Rugged individualism is fine until it forgets that there are neighbors.

Lydia, the American West to which you refer wasn't that of the cowboy, it was the instead that of the mountain man/trapper. It never involved more than a very small number of folks and lasted a couple of decades.

Cowboys, like miners, were workers who were poorly paid for dangerous and grueling jobs. They usually worked for large, often foreign investors.

Post the mountain man the west was all about paper and subsidy as a simple meander through the records in any county seat will demonstrate. The scarcity of water led to the early development of water rights law. The actual history of the period is about who owns what, per mile railroad subsidies, and using the power of the state to get rid of those inconvenient red skinned folk who beat us here by a few thousand years (some traditions and communities count and others don't, i guess).

It is interesting to ponder how some political views depend on believing in that which never was.

P.S. those cottonwood trees were likely turned into charcoal to fuel some smelter.

Interestingly, Rob, I think that hand in hand with the "rugged individualist" stereotype of the settler has gone the "hospitality" stereotype. I've read a popular British novel that has a letter (fictional of course) from a British naval doctor during WWII concerning the wonderful hospitality they are receiving from the Americans in New York. He says that he thinks it comes from the old settler idea that out on the frontier you treat your guests very well while at the same time keeping a hand on your gun. "Which," he adds, "is the other side of the American character."

I actually think that's a pretty fair summary: Help your neighbors, because it might be you next time. Welcome and be hospitable to guests, because we all have to stick together out here in the middle of nowhere. Keep a hand on your gun, in case the person who just came over the horizon is a bad guy.

There is something important to the human spirit about being able to look at a huge frontier vista tens of miles across, and saying "I could go out there if I (insert one: wanted to, chose to, needed to) to explore it, tame it, settle it, or even just to watch it." Even if not every such vista you look at is so, there needs to be some such open space somewhere that has the potential.

This human need is found more strongly in some than others. The pioneer spirited obviously had it in spades. And, this need is capable of being felt/used to excess: if I recall correctly, Daniel Boone had it so bad that he forced his suffering wife to up and move 3 times when they got a neighbor within a mile.

But of course, the very possibility of meeting this need requires land - lots of land - that is untamed, unused, unclaimed, and even (to fulfill the needs of some) unexplored. And yet every piece of land has a potential use for other purposes besides that of frontier. Either as farm, or road, or neighborhood, or whatever. And most of the time for each piece of land, these other uses are of greater value to individuals and to society than as frontier. That's why we set aside parks and forest. But it must be admitted that such a preserve only meets part of the need of the human spirit - it does not provide true frontier. You cannot explore it (they have all been explored to death), you cannot tame it in any way, and you certainly cannot claim it.

The solution: space, the final frontier. We NEED the X-plane and other advances toward privately funded space exploration and use.

"The solution: space, the final frontier."

Tony,
Would exploring cyberspace do? Seriously - would it?

Michael, only for the very, very miniscule subset of the exploratory-minded who are also geeks. It simply won't do for the anti-geek who wants and needs physical expression.

Maybe Irving Berlin asked Roy Rogers to be the first to sing it, but the lyrics were by Robert Fletcher and the music by Cole Porter.

Cyrillist, my mistake.

Tony, I think you make a good and an interesting point, and I think it is no coincidence that America's spirit of liberty has developed in such a _large_ country. I doubt, however, that space exploration is practicable, whether fortunately or unfortunately. (I also kind of doubt the analogy. Going out in an oxygen-enhanced tube surrounded by a deadly void isn't really the road to freedom. It's a little bit like being on shipboard in the middle of the trackless ocean, only much worse, and for much longer.)

Lydia,

It is a bit off topic, but I couldn't resist directing you and W4 readers to this fascinating essay about individualism in an interesting Christian journal I just stumbled across:

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/35-3/editorial-contrarian-reflections-on-individualism

The author makes some points relevant to this discussion, especially how to make sense of a Christian spirit of individualism. Enjoy!

Tony is probably right about the Daniel Boone's of the world, but that may be 0.05% of persons, or some similarly low number. The vast majority of people that moved west did it to escape the statism of the New England elites who had all the good land, good jobs, and good businesses such that making it from scratch had become difficult. If you weren't the eldest brother your future was dim in the area of your birth. It is always this way. They wanted to be successful and the ways of doing it had run out locally. See the book "Valley of democracy; the frontier versus the plantation in the Ohio Valley, 1775-1818" by John Donald Barnhart on this.

In fact, I think the adventurism that Tony describes isn't only expressed geographically, and may well be expressed in the imaginative and intellectual spirit, and this need might well be satisfied in part in cyberspace. At least when it catches up to what we only recently have in a university modern interlibrary loan system. I don't think the universities have yet grasped how revolutionary is a total availability of books in or out of print delivered at what amounts to a subscription fee. Or maybe they do and that would explain why they keep piling on more classes, credit hours, and guided study so the students won't notice. I actually do see formal education as an obstacle to learning. Maybe Ivan Illich was right.

Very interesting article, Jeff.

1) Everything I needed to know about the pioneers and the frontier I learned from the Little House series and the historical writings about the Ingalls and Wilder families. Those books featured the rugged individualism of Pa and the hospitality of Ma. The perfect complement of the two found in the family. Fascinating and true and I didn't read the series until I was homeschooling my kids.

2) I do go to that Gospel Coalition blogsite for good posts.

I like the reactionary sentiments expressed in the song. Spiritual misery is the price of industrial prosperity.

Don't speak of progress. It never again mattered to me where I lived after I saw the spacious, dilapidated homes pass away and the wide open, deserted fields of my infancy covered with industrial and human filth.


Would exploring cyberspace do? Seriously - would it?

Ah, apparently, you haven't heard of the Dark Web, the Hidden Web, or the Darknet , mwhahaha...

Black holes on the web... Be warned.

The Chicken

Would exploring cyberspace do? Seriously - would it?

Rats! I wrote a post about black holes on the internet and it got held over for review. Talk about irony.

The solution: space, the final frontier. We NEED the X-plane and other advances toward privately funded space exploration and use.

Really? Do you know how vast space is and how slow the speed of light really is? Unless you figure out how to compress space a la warp drive, we ain't goin' nowhere mighty fast. Generational ships will be lost and never heard from, again.

Also, heck, we can't even explore the space in our own hearts anymore. I doubt we will get far into space until we solve that problem.

The whole land problem is a problem of the heart and not the mind. Cowboys may have been cantankerous, but they lived by a code. We don't even have a code that will let you hang a horse thief anymore, but first, there must be a committee to study the problem and decide if the post-modern metaphysics of ownership really would require said horse to apologize to the thief for not running away and providing him with a temptation. Eventually, they will decide to hang the horse and salute the man.

Progress follows the imagination and guess which faculty we are making into a blunt instrument, today? The imagination thrives not on simple challenges, but on the realization of an almost ghost-like school-boy taunt from reality that says, "You can't have that". The imagination say, "Oh, yeah?"

St. Benedict used to say that one should always eat just a little less than one needs. The lack will keep one focused on what is essential. The problem, nowadays, is that technology has been too successful, too tranquilizing. It's hot outside, turn on the heat. You can't remember the famous soliloquy from Hamlet? Don't bother to learn it, to own the knowledge. Let Google tell you so you can read it and forget it and have to find it, again.

New frontier? Heck, we can't even hang on to the land we've got, whether physical, mental, or imaginary. Everyone wants to solve problems today from the outside-in instead of the inside-out. You want land? First, you have to smell the land, you have to hold the land in your fingers, you have to wallow it around in your tongue. Until you do this, you will never own the land. You will merely live on it, never with it.

How can anyone claim to be looking for a new frontier who does not know how to suffer for it? We haven't lost our pioneer spirit. We have lost the ability to suffer for a just cause.

The Chicken

al - what an amazingly tone-deaf "response" to Lydia's post.

"It is interesting to ponder how some political views depend on believing in that which never was."

Indeed it is.

"...some traditions and communities count and others don't, i guess..."

Well, just speaking for myself, traditions and communities that believe that the traditions and communities of others count - count, for me.

Others don't, so much.

But no doubt you can provide me with a long list of Amerindian "traditions and communities" who believed that the "traditions and communities" of others counted for something.

As Jeff said on the previous thread, Al is humorless, so I guess we know not to invite him to a party. Next up from Al: A disquisition on how the West was proletarianized.

@Gina--Ever notice how it always expressly said those books that Pa wanted to move on when he felt that some particular area was getting too settled and "crowded"? And none of it sounded crowded _at all_. I thought that was really striking.

Also, the contrast in the books between _settlers_ and _farmers_. To a modern reader, Pa was a farmer. He was often trying to raise some crops for them to eat; when the locusts came, it was a disaster for them. Of course he was a farmer, you'd think. But not really. Almanzo is a real farmer, and it's a different life for her to be a farmer's wife.

That, by the way, is the kind of thing that shows the Little House books to be authentic history by people who lived at the time, unlike modern historical novels--those contrasts that a modern person would never think of, brought up in a natural way.

"Lydia, the American West to which you refer wasn't that of the cowboy, it was the instead that of the mountain man/trapper. It never involved more than a very small number of folks and lasted a couple of decades."

Al, for a Californian that's just an inexcusably ignorant statement. Where do you come up with this stuff? Ranching was a HUGE part of early California culture and economy - almost exclusively so before the Gold Rush - and in some parts of the state the ranching culture is still dominant. Even so, Lydia's core message is just as valid with respect to pioneers in general as it is for cowboys in particular.

Black holes on the web... Be warned.

Universes in the lab, coming soon?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7972538/Are-we-living-in-a-designer-universe.html

Generational ships will be lost and never heard from, again.

That is what quantum teleportation is supposed to be good for.

(Sure _sounds_ a lot more like Berlin than Porter, though! :-) )

>> ... you have to wallow it around in your tongue. Until you do this, you will never own the land. You will merely live on it, never with it.

I suppose the tongue bit was ... um ... in cheek? But otherwise this seems a bit strong. I was raised on a farm in the midwest and grew up plowing fields and tending animals. I don't see how a businessman with a warehouse on a piece of land, a dirt bike rider, or even a homeowner with a swingset doesn't own and feel attached to the land in a similar way to the farmer. Go to farming country in the Rust Belt and see all the descendants of farmers who romanticize the UAW jobs they once had. Little work and lots of benefits --what's not to like? A more bitter and angry lot you'll never see. However, I'm not saying it isn't a shame that large agribusiness is now growing our food and that we don't have more small farmers. But farmers themselves would think this romantic talk is for the sentimental college professor or Willie Nelson when he isn't stoned.

>> How can anyone claim to be looking for a new frontier who does not know how to suffer for it? We haven't lost our pioneer spirit. We have lost the ability to suffer for a just cause.

I think this is a bit extreme. At least men and women in our armed forces prove this every day. It may be fewer and fewer and that is a worry, but if so it won't be because they failed the institutions, but the reverse. I'm of the Steven Davies camp. Even when things are getting better and better, most people think things are getting worse. There are reasons for this rooted in psychology. There are some worrisome things to be sure though, but there have always been. One of the benefits of being a Civil War buff is that when you can visualize the nation in the darkest days it puts things in perspective.

I assure you that the Civil War was not this Country's darkest days, merely its stupidest.

Quantum teleportation cannot be used to teleport matter. Look up the Anti-teleportation Theorem on Wikipedia.

The military does not usually involve individualism and direct personal actions and choices. They do not usually make lasting Founding Fathers.

The Chicken

Sorry. Grumpy Chicken, today...

The Chicken

Chicken, I grant you that space is not perfect in every respect as a frontier. It will be at least 100 years, possibly much longer, before a pioneer-type with few resources will be able to look to the solar system as a place where he can carve out a stake. (Though a bean-pole would shorten the amount of time by 50%.) The problem of star travel is not a real mark against space giving us frontier until the local neighborhood is played out, and that won't be for at least 500 years after we have easy planetary travel. I am fine with saying that space is the solution for the next 500 years.

I reject, though, that we MUST somehow learn to conquer the interior frontiers before doing anything about the exterior ones. Every man and woman must deal with the space in their own hearts, minds, and souls, and that challenge is real whether you are a pioneer, an urban office dweller, or anything else. And doing so simply doesn't equate to being ready to "solve" the space issue. If I am right that there is a need in the human heart for taking on frontiers, then the internal issue runs alongside the external one and the pioneer type is the one who learns to meet BOTH challenges, the interior while also dealing with the exterior one. Just as a father must learn the virtues of patience and justice to deal with his interior anger WHILE ALSO dealing with a rebellious child, and cannot wait to acquire patience and justice in perfection before taking on the problem of the rebellious child.

Cowboys may have been cantankerous, but they lived by a code. We don't even have a code that will let you hang a horse thief anymore

While I agree with Chicken that we as a society are losing the normative social and moral codes that properly inform the heart, that isn't the full picture. In reality, we have never had a society as a whole whose moral codes were so thoroughly interiorized that people naturally did the right things for the right reason (love of God) - it has always been the case that many, if not most, stayed within bounds of the code a lot of the time out of fear instead. Secondly, until the last half of the 20th century, there ALWAYS HAS BEEN a physical frontier which the hardy, and the cantankerous near-outlaw could resort to if they could not stand social limitations as prescribed for them. One of the reasons frontier is so necessary is precisely as that pressure escape valve for the almost-but-not-quite criminal element to take on a licit and moral way to escape minute social constraints. I.E., a place for people to learn the need for character development without becoming hardened criminals and society's enemies in the process.

I am fine with saying that space is the solution for the next 500 years

Mars is the only habitable planet and the nearest star will take (by conventional means) 50,000 years to reach. We are quite limited in terms of the manned exploration of space.

As for the heart issue, people are mostly interested in creature comforts, today. This is a situation that has not really existed in a thriving, expanding country in times past. The level of discontent necessary for pioneering no longer rises to the level of quiet desperation, let alone nothing-to-lose. We stopped exploring the moon and all attempts to get the program re-started have shown a distinct lack of will. A manned flight to Mars anytime soon is a joke. we simply do not have the will in the West to undertake these sorts of quests, anymore. There are plenty of malcontents in the second- and third-world countries and they are the ones who are gearing up for space travel (although I hardly see the point beyond the moon and Mars, since we don't have the ability to get anywhere else).

The Chicken

I know Step2 meant his remark about quantum teleportation as a joke, but there really is a No Teleportation Theorem.

The Chicken

"Al, for a Californian that's just an inexcusably ignorant statement. Where do you come up with this stuff? Ranching was a HUGE part of early California culture..."

Oh, is that why I keep tripping over ancient strands of barbed wire up in the forest. Jeff, I don't think Lydia was thinking of gay vaqueros working the ranches created by grants from the Spanish Crown (Sepulveda was a person and a land grant before it wa a street). In 1845 California was Mexico and by 1850 it was a state. Drought in the 1880s led Southern California cattlemen to ship their cattle to Arizona at which point John Wayne rides in.

But all that is besides the point. Lydia wrote this'

"But we didn't get here all at once. We got here by gradually losing the cowboy spirit, the pioneering spirit, and the rightful disdain for "show me your papers," "sign here," "how much cholesterol does that meal contain?" and "do you have a license to sell those brownies?" The old women, male and female, have taken over, and increasingly, there is no more frontier and nowhere simply to carry out one's life without its every tiniest aspect being overseen and regulated for Our Own Good",

which is ahistorical nonsense (Steve, had she contented herself with cowboy inspired musings on gender roles I should likely not have commented but she took her fantasies into the political which makes them dangerous).

Where we have cowboys we have cattle and where we have cattle we have water and where we have water we have ranches. Where we have water and ranches we have surveys, claims, deeds. and water law. Where we have surveys, deeds. and water law we will have courts, lawyers, and sheriffs. Oh, and where we have ranches we will also have railroads and where we have railroads we will have towns. Cowboys are not about the frontier spirit, they are about the end of the frontier - the spirit part is fiction created by eastern writers of pulp fiction and B movie producers.

"Next up from Al: A disquisition on how the West was proletarianized."

Which is precisely what cowboys and miners were. Cowboys aren't the really interesting part of all this anyway. Labor issues around the mines are far more interesting and relevant and brings to mind a far more meaningful song,

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he.

"The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe" says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man"
Says Joe "I didn't die"
Says Joe "I didn't die"

"In Salt Lake City, Joe," says I,
Him standing by my bed,
"They framed you on a murder charge,"
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead,"
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead."

And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe "What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize"

From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where working men defend their rights,
it's there you'll find Joe Hill,
it's there you'll find Joe Hill!

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he."

Tramping around ghost towns and old cemeteries leads one to reflect how hard life was back then. Riding fence in heat and cold for bupkis wasn't very romantic and hard rock mining is hard work. Gilded age plutocrats sucked the marrow from these folks bones, something we shouldn't forget.

"where we have ranches we will also have railroads and where we have railroads we will have towns. Cowboys are not about the frontier spirit, they are about the end of the frontier"

Wrong, Al. It is the railroads that brought the end of the frontier, indeed the end of "the West." Cowboys, ranches, and towns existed well before the railroads showed up. For a filmic representation of this whole "mythos" see Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.

>> I assure you that the Civil War was not this Country's darkest days, merely its stupidest.

This is an absurd statement, whether made grumpily or not. So is stating you can assure anyone of anything with no positive statements of any sort.

The legalization of abortion and the wholesale slaughter of Innocents is a much darker day than anything that happened in the Civil War. You don't agree?

The Chicken

"The author makes some points relevant to this discussion, especially how to make sense of a Christian spirit of individualism. Enjoy!"

Just now read the essay linked by Jeff Singer; it is interesting, but I found it telling that the Trinity is mentioned only once in the entire piece, and that in passing. If the inner life of the very Godhead is, in fact, communitarian, it seems to me that Christians must be wary of individualism, lest it be exalted to the point where it is corrosive of community. Christianity is an inherently communitarian faith, given the nature of our God and His Church. As an old Russian saying goes, "the only thing you can do by yourself is go to hell."

*nitpick*
At the time that song was released, if you'd walked up to a law-abiding guy who rides a horse after cattle for a living and loves the freedom of it all and called him a cowboy, you probably would have been punched in the nose. I was in my teens before my parents-- ranch-hands as long as they'd been alive, and growing up around ranches, farms and ranch-hands-- could be called "cowboy" by an adult and not twitch.

Know the black-hats in a lot of old westerns? The Evil Gang of Cattle Rustlers? Those were "cowboys"-- they'd hire on in the summer to move the cows around, but would take anything not nailed down. Generally assumed to have a criminal record, and you made sure nothing more valuable than the pay they were expecting was around to be lifted.

Trying to keep that one little bit of cultural history alive. ^.^

That said-- I really understand the need for space. In a good, healthy society, people have to adapt to the folks around them-- it's rude to bring in bacon cheeseburger surprise for the office if you've got a Jewish guy, a Hindu and a vegan, or to order only the Meat'o'rama Pizza on Fridays in Lent when there's Catholics. You know the folks you interact with, and adapt to avoid causing them distress, and you are kind to them when possible.

Our "next door" neighbor when I was a very little girl was a lady we called Neighbor, and our token bleeding-heart liberal. She didn't even want to scare the deer out of her garden for the first few years she was in the valley, and she took the death of her chickens the way we took the death of one of dad's dogs. She lived a mile away cross-country, but she's our neighbor, so dad did a LOT of animal burials, we didn't hunt "her" deer, etc.
Where we live now is still pretty defuse, but... I can't wrap my mind around being "neighbor" to just the folks that are in our COMPLEX, even if they were open to it. That would be well over two hundred "households," several of which are adult roommates that switch out as their assignments change.

People need space, so-- just like in Japan-- they build that space in their heads. You don't interact with people who happen to be geographically near you, you interact with those you choose in some other manner.

Problem: just because you don't interact with those near you doesn't mean that you don't have an effect them. Aaaand that's where we get all the nanny-state BS, in a small bundle.

Very interesting comment, Foxfier.

Err--what are you supposed to call "a law-abiding guy who rides a horse after cattle for a living and loves the freedom of it all"?

Clint Eastwood? John Wayne?
George Bush?

"Next up from Al: A disquisition on how the West was proletarianized."

Something you'll never learn from films and dime novels, so much for the freedom part.

"In West Texas during the 1880s new owners, representing eastern and European investment companies, gained control of the ranching industry and brought with them innovations threatening to many ranchhands. Previously, cowboys could take part of their pay in calves, brand mavericks, and even run small herds on their employers' land. New ranch owners, interested in expanding their holdings and increasing their profits, insisted that the hands work only for wages and claimed mavericks as company property. The work was seasonal. It required long hours and many skills, was dangerous, and paid only an average of forty dollars a month."

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/oec02

Note that the owners actions would have punished those with the most initiative and sense of self-reliance.

Lydia -
"Ranch-hand." Or rancher, if they're the guy in charge. Rancher is a good generic.

The culture has rather made it a moot point-- good gosh, people were KILLED over the difference between shepherd and cattle worker, now we've got movies about gay sheep wranglers that everyone calls cowboys-- but I like to think that folks will remember back a little, and vaguely remember that at one point, "cowboy" was an insult to decent folks, rather than an insult against decent folks.

Foxfier, is there a possibility that there might be regional differences in perception here? There is in Wyoming a firm called the Cowboy State Bank which was founded in 1912. If cowboys were generally associated with criminality, why would a bank with that name have survived?

>> The legalization of abortion and the wholesale slaughter of Innocents is a much darker day than anything that happened in the Civil War. You don't agree?

I never said that the Civil War was a greater moral evil than other events.

The context of our exchange was the claim that "We have lost the ability to suffer for a just cause", which I theorized was more psychological despair than reality. If true, the national crisis of the CW was an appropriate comparison and made the point I wished to make.

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/35-3/editorial-contrarian-reflections-on-individualism

>> Just now read the essay linked … it is interesting, but I found it telling that the Trinity is mentioned only once in the entire piece, and that in passing. If the inner life of the very Godhead is, in fact, communitarian, it seems to me that Christians must be wary of individualism, lest it be exalted to the point where it is corrosive of community.

Did you proof text the piece for the word "Trinity" before or after deciding you didn't like how it dealt with the sacred cow of "individualism"? How does the strategy of proof-texting for that word work out for you when reading scripture?

I thought the article was a tour de force and I'm delighted that Jeff linked it (and I found a sweet journal I didn't know of besides). I thought it a welcome answer to the shallow cliches about individualism that have little to do with Christianity, but have poured out of evangelical pulpits for decades now and passes for wisdom.

Al-
I have no idea what town morons may have done. All I pay attention to is what the folks living the life actually called themselves.

Remember: they guys making the movies thought that "cowboy" was generic, too.

Al- look at the "Cowboy State Bank" and you'll find it was renamed that in '01, from Ranchester State Bank.

Thanks, Foxfier--seriously, I'm glad to have that historical perspective on the words "cowboy," "rancher," and "ranch-hand."

~~Did you proof text the piece for the word "Trinity" before or after deciding you didn't like how it dealt with the sacred cow of "individualism"? How does the strategy of proof-texting for that word work out for you when reading scripture?~~

I read it once and noticed the near-omission on 2nd reading. I'm Orthodox -- we notice things like that. I don't proof-text, and I haven't sat in front of an "evangelical pulpit" for nearly 20 years. Be so kind as to file your complaint elsewhere, sir.

MC,
Thanks for the clarification. I was under the mistaken impression that it could be used for communication at faster than light speeds. Since you seem to have some expertise, let me ask a question directly: Does faster than light speed necessarily require time travel or not?

Does FTL speed require time travel?

Yes and No. It is possible to project a signal faster-than-light without time travel if only part of the signal is faster than light. A cool experiment showed that one could project a radio signal so the speaker played the music before one transmit it, but the music is heard in our spacetime, so no time travel. How? Only part of the wave was FLT. The GROUP VELOCITY of the wave was less than the speed of light. If the entire wave travels faster-than-light, then you have time travel.

The Chicken

From Anthony Esolen: 'the "individual" as understood in rationalist social-contract theories is, for the Christian, already a reduction, even an abstraction.'

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2010/12/freedom-for-man.html

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.