Our friend Rod Dreher is back with a new job (at The American Conservative) and a new blog:
One of the editorial tasks I’ve set for myself at TAC is to seek out more pieces about culture for the magazine. And I mean “culture” in a broad sense, including religion, art, architecture, food, morals, places, ideas — basically, the meaningful aspects of life that aren’t entailed by the usual areas of focus of opinion magazines, namely politics, economics, law, and foreign policy. I had come to believe before my year-long sabbatical that culture is more important than politics, as my old readers will remember, but this time away has convinced me of that even more.
September 6th, 2011 | 12:21 pm
I agree that culture is more important, but Rod is going to have to transcend his own culture to be effective in talking about it. I don’t think he can. Being a crunchy con was always more about your social class than any real ideology-the prole classes didn’t care about organic gardening because they cant afford it.
September 6th, 2011 | 5:13 pm
“the prole classes didn’t care about organic gardening because they cant afford it.”
Unless you’re talking about the really low income people who don’t even have access to a workable 8×8 plot of land, I don’t see how that’s true. Even some of those folks have access to community gardening. And not-using-chemicals is actually without marginal cost.
September 6th, 2011 | 5:24 pm
The American Conservative actually calls itself “The magazine for thinking conservatives”? How precious. Well, Rod Dreher should fit right in at a place comfortable with a tagline like that, I suppose…
September 6th, 2011 | 8:44 pm
“including religion, art, architecture, food, morals, places, ideas — basically, the meaningful aspects of life that aren’t entailed by the usual areas of focus of opinion magazines”
This new unfocused strategy is a brilliant one. Basically he can write about whatever pops into his head at any time and call it “culture”. Eating a lettuce? Food culture. Driving in heavy traffic? Urban culture. Wondering if your wife is cheating? Marital culture. The newest video game? Techno culture. But isn’t it time someone imbued the average standup comic’s routine with a little gravitas?
September 6th, 2011 | 9:09 pm
Pentamom, hard to care about farming and maintaining a plot of land when you need to work 60+ hours a week as a single mom. Especially when you can at best just keep a window box in your crummy apartment.
Most of the crunchy con things are the luxuries of the mid-to-upper middle class. If only for time. Barbara Ehrerenrich is not someone I agree with often, but I think all crunchy cons really need to read her book Nickel and Dimed before they wax rhapsodic about stewardship of the earth and other things.
September 7th, 2011 | 10:18 am
Dblade, I’ve read Nickel and Dimed. I agree that people don’t all have the “luxury” of living a certain way. OTOH, that book was not about how “being poor” limits your options so much as about how “making bad choices that alienate you from a community” is destructive. Yes, that book did illuminate how being in a hole makes it harder to dig out — I don’t dispute that. But about 50% of the problems of the situation Ehrenreich put herself into would have evaporated if she’d had people to turn to — not necessarily well off people, but just people who had the one thing needful to share with her at a given moment. And if you have friends, those people are usually to be found, even among other poor people.
Anyway, I’m not saying that the problems of poor people generally are all, or even mostly, of their own making. I just think it was a flaw in the book that it purported to being about what being poor does to you, when it was actually about what being poor plus having no social network and a really bad attitude does to you. The issues are still real, but they need to be clarified. That book actually muddies them.
That said, you started with a sweeping comment about “the proles” and then responded to me by taking an extreme example of a 60-hr/week single mom. Yes, those “extreme” people exist in significant numbers and yes their concerns need to be taken into consideration. But I took “prole” to mean economically slightly below average people and below, not *only* the desperately poor. There *are* plenty of people who can manage a bit of a garden — it is not purely a luxury item as you suggested, and it is in fact to their economic and physical benefit. There are people who are so badly off that they can’t, but is it really going to be the standard that we can only consider generally useful what is accessible even to the extremely deprived?
September 7th, 2011 | 4:47 pm
And then those pesky arrogant bourgeois crunchy cons go and try something like this:
http://theurbanfarmingguys.com/
September 7th, 2011 | 6:53 pm
He has my sympathy. I would wager he applied for a position at the Templeton Foundation because he figured that the newspaper business would soon be kaput and that the Templeton Foundation has recently informed its employees that Mr. Dreher would be ‘leaving to pursue other opportunities’. He now lands on its feet as it were with a position at an opinion magazine with one-tenth the circulation of the one which employed him nine years ago. I would tend to doubt that Taki or Ron Unz or whomever is the current patron of The American Conservative is paying salaries which would allow a man with four dependents to save money.
September 7th, 2011 | 9:56 pm
Maggie, it’s easy when you can leave at any time your project goes sour. When you live in that situation, and by living I don’t mean creating a buffer community and commuting out to your knowledge job, you see stuff like that as short term things designed to assuage guilt rather than change the system.
Pentamom, rather than prolong it with arguing one specific aspect of it, being a crunchy con is all about being upper-mid. FT has been reporting on the gaps between the classes when it comes to marriage and childbirth, and this is also similar. It’s like the mirror image of the information tech libertarian. A lot of us just live in a different world than that.
September 8th, 2011 | 12:31 am
Pentamom, hard to care about farming and maintaining a plot of land when you need to work 60+ hours a week as a single mom. …Most of the crunchy con things are the luxuries of the mid-to-upper middle class. If only for time. Barbara Ehrerenrich is not someone I agree with often, but I think all crunchy cons really need to read her book Nickel and Dimed before they wax rhapsodic about stewardship of the earth and other things.
Two-thirds of the population lives in owner occupied housing and many of those who do not refrain not because they are impecunious but because they have debts to pay or are too mobile or do not have dependent children. About 8% of personal income is expended on groceries. About 6% of the working women in this country put in more than 50 hours per week.
September 9th, 2011 | 11:15 am
Dblade, I don’t actually deny that Crunchy Con has a bit of an upper-mid, having the luxury of making certain choices, flavor to it.
Which is why I find it doubly baffling that you chose to broadside it using as an example what is probably the least elitist, most broadly applicable, most useful to people in challenging economic circumstances thing they commonly advocate — how to get yourself better food cheaply. I guess I reacted because you chose the strangest possible thing to use as an example of “elitism.”
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