Bibliographic Entry - Nonfiction:

Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery

When an entire people have been laid low by a major, protracted disaster (in this case, African Americans and slavery), how do they pull themselves up in the aftermath? Booker T. Washington had the right formula, and one applicable across racial or other dividing lines: Build strong families, build strong churches, build strong schools, build strong businesses.

Extended personal commentary:

For those of us who are strongly inclined toward a bottom-up, decentralized, conservative/libertarian/communitarian vision of society rather than a top-down, centralized, statist view, Booker T. Washington's book and life's work (he was the founder of the Tuskeegee Institute, for those of you who didn't know) has an important place in our intellectual heritage.

Joseph Shumpeter is famous for observing that capitalism -- and especially modern technological capitalism -- is "a process of creative destruction". Unfortunately, among the things which our modern technological capitalism has "creatively destroyed" are some of the basic building blocks of a healthy, humane, resilliant, and sustainable society. Things like families, churches, schools, small familiy owned businesses, and other local community institutions. We have become, as Vance Packard observed over three decades ago, "A Nation of Strangers". The more severe that Y2K proves to be, the more that the folly of this trend will become realized.

Hopefully, Y2K and its aftermath will provide a welcome opportunity for us to re-assess where we have come from, the direction in which we were heading, the unfavorable consequences of that in terms of what we had lost, and how we might change direction in a more positive way which is conserving of local, decentralized community institutions.

There is a specific agenda here which needs to be explored and developed:

Families:

The decline of the American family has been extensively documented in the sociological literature and the popular press. It has become increasingly difficult for many -- if not most -- of our people to form marriages, hold them together, and raise children as effective parents. The extended family is a thing of the past, much to our loss as latchkey children get themselves into trouble without adult supervision and the elderly rot in nursing homes.

An important aftermath reconstruction project has got to be to build strong families. To do this, we need to ask ourselves: what things work to strengthen marriage and family life, and what things work against them? We need to promote the first, and discourage the other. I don't have all the answers on this, but it needs to be discussed here.

Churches and other community groups:

Since I assume that Ed's book will be targeted to a general and secular audience, I will quickly add here that the main point here is that, whatever each individual's belief system might be, it is clearly a positive thing for that person to live within a larger, caring, mutually-supporting community of other people. Churches have traditionally fulfilled that role for most of our people in most of our communities. Some of our churches continue to do quite well, but others have been languishing. And there are too many people who have no real involvement with any church or other community group. Again, how do we reverse this trend in the aftermath?

Schools:

We have gone from the one-room neighborhood school to the centrally-consolidated mega-institution, with children bussed in from many miles away. Parents rarely have any real involvement with their children's schools, nor do many parents take a very active role in educating their children. What have we gotten as a result? Graduates of our schools who are virtually illiterate, an explosion in teenage sexual activity & pregnancy, drug use, and school violence.

Increasing numbers of parents who care are turning to homeschooling as an alternative to combat these trends, and that certainly is part of the answer. A big part, however, is going to have to include the closing of the big centralized schools, the creation of decentralized neighborhood schools under neighborhood control, and the more active involvement of parents in their children's education. We are also going to have to get more serious about education and get these kids well educated by the time that they are old enough to work.

Businesses:

The industrial revolution, the rise of the modern corporation, the assembly line, and automation have progressively taken their toll on the self-employed and small businesses. Now globalization of trade and intensive use of computer networks has added a new round of pressures on the small business sector. Yes, it is "efficient", as long as the systems keep working. Y2K will test that severely. Nevertheless, hidden within such "efficiency" is a terrible toll of "creative destruction" as small-scale local businesses are wiped out by the competitive pressures, mid-level professionals are downsized, and workers are displaced by cheaper foreign competition. A few rich get much richer, and an ever-increasing number of the rest of us become increasingly poorer.

As someone who is very much in favor of free markets as an autonomous and elegantly resilliant self-regulating institution, I am not at all favorable toward "solutions" to this problem which call for yet another increase in the power and size of central government.

It would seem to me that this phenomenon is largely driven by the consolidation of local markets in to large nation states, the elimination of internal tariffs -- followed recently by the elimination of international tariffs, and by continuing improvements in transportation and communication systems. The creation of a vast internal duty-free zone has been beneficial for the US as a whole, and it will also undoubtedly be for the EU as well. However, hidden within that aggregate result lies considerable regional and local disparities. This result is writ even larger on the global stage as global tariffs are being reduced and elimated. The devolution and breakdown of larger national entities into their natural regional components, and the protection of the economic sovereignty and diversity of those localities by reasonable tariff barriers, might be the best answer to this problem, even though it will admittedly come at an economic cost in the aggregate.

-- Stefan Stackhouse (stefans@mindspring.com), August 13, 1999

Answers

Stephan, your initial question was stated this way: <> Your responses are obviously well thought out and articulate. But for a broad audience in a general discussion your ideas run ahead of our ability to comprehend their relevance to a protracted Y2K disaster. Can you help us focus on how we as a people, most of whom are about to experience a head on car crash without seat belts, air bags or crash helmets, can survive the ride to the hospital, survive the emergency surgery, survive the weeks in intensive care, the months in post operative therapy... For those of us that are convinced the systemic nature of Y2K will bring at least a 6 to 9 on our scenario scale, there is no way the people of America will not experience a tremendous sense of loss. Loss of trust in the financial markets when their wealth is wiped out by a crashed stock market. Loss of trust in banks when their banks close due to bank runs or cascading cross defaults, or crashed computer systems, or massive debt write-offs. Loss of trust in the division of labor when wholesale layoffs occur in every major industry as businesses large and small go belly up for any of a thousand Y2K precipitated problems. Loss of trust in corporate and governmental leadership for not having forseen the obvious systemic nature of the Y2K bug, and its potential to devastate the world - and began preparing us years ago so that January 1st, 2000 could have been fear-free. Loss of trust in their fellow American when they see the craziness that anger, hunger, thirst, fear, and survival instincts in full bore create mayhem and looting in every hamlet and burrow. How does America rebuild from ground zero? How do Americans cope with the anger they will surely feel with this great sense of loss? They will have to absorb this anger while fighting for daily survival. Do we still have "the right stuff" that got us through the Depression and WWII? I don't know. Can you envision the path that Americans will travel these next few years? What kind of leadership can lead a people through devastation? How can the American people show to themselves that they still have the right stuff? Will families and friends forge tight communities to survive the worst? Then, as trust builds, and infrastructures begin to reform and function, will households begin to form community bonds with neighbors, and so on? What's your take on this? --Greg Walsh

-- Greg Walsh (walshbros1@aol.com), August 19, 1999.

Greg:

I think that in the smaller towns and rural areas, there is a sufficient residual of communitarian and traditional values, and that when the crunch comes people will pull together.

I am considerably less optimistic about the cities. I am afraid that the most likely scenario is that they will self-destruct from within, and that the Fedgov forces will have no choice but to seal them off from the outside to cauterize the wound and limit the damage to the remaining, repairable society.

-- Stefan Stackhouse (stefans@mindspring.com), August 19, 1999.

Stefan: I agree completely with this assessment. Let's pray we're wrong. --- Greg

-- Greg Walsh (walshbros1@aol.com), August 19, 1999.

Stephan,

As I am a fan of Booker T. Washington, I am thrilled that you see some analogy between the difficulties of transition from slavery to freedom and possible Y2K disasters and reconstruction. For those that can see it, Booker's insights were profoundly existential. Unlike existentialist thought, his insight remains meaningful. Life confronts each of us with possibilities that lead either to despair or to hope: despair and hope weighing equally. This is the challenge that life throws to us: to hope! The Year 2000 also puts this challenge to us.

Sincerely, Stan Faryna

-- Stan Faryna (info@giglobal.com), August 24, 1999.

P.S. Is it coincidence that we both recommend "Up from Slavery;" you here and me, in an old thread on recommended Y2K reading?

-- Stan Faryna (info@giglobal.com), August 24, 1999.

As a former research assistant for Michael Novak at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Novak and Peter Berger had a little book on these elements that you describe. Novak and Berger described them as mediating structures. If I remember correctly, Novak followed this little book with another. These two might be good books to add to Ed's bibliogaphy for this chapter. Unfortunately, I forget the titles just now.

Sincerely, Stan Faryna

-- Stan Faryna (info@giglobal.com), August 24, 1999.

Both of my children graduated from a two room schoolhouse. One room had K-4th grade and the other 5th-8th. (My eldest child is now at a university and the youngest, in high school.)

I do not believe their education suffered. On the contrary, the experience was strong on cultural enrichment. All 45 children in the school learned a musical instrument and we had a "musical" dramatic production each year. Touring artists often visited the school through national arts programs. One of my children competed on the State level in history. There was a ton of parental involvement. We had a deli day at Valentines Day when the kids would pre-order and we would make up the sandwiches. We also did a full Thanksgiving Dinner with all the trimmings to make sure every child had a celebration. (We do have much poverty.)

Our little school was like a large extended family. Older children learned to be gentle with the youngers, particularly in sports. Intramural sports was probably the one big area where the kids suffered. They just couldn't make up a team when each grade only had 1-3 kids.

-- marsh (armstrng@sisqtel.net), August 25, 1999.

From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr (pic), near Monterey, California

To Empower People: From State to Civil Society

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), October 08, 1999.

Models - hmmm, I can think of several in my community.

In re-reading the above thread, the Mormon "community" came to mind as a model. (Many Mormon people are agriculturalists.) I don't know much about their society's structure, but it would seem to be akin to a clan. Aside from the religious component, I would be interested in knowing more about their organization.

In our small valley, it is the Mormon parents that are among the most active in volunteering in supporting children's activities. They seem to be very family oriented and do many activities as a family. There are also many that serve as volunteers in emergency services and in public office. There is a sort of expectation of "service" inculcated into everyone. In my experience, these values seem to be more in evidence among our Mormon neighbors than among other religious groups. You do see youth activities among the Catholics and Protestants, but not "family" activities. Amazingly, many Mormon Mom's work outside the home, have large families, yet they still have time to be involved.

Another family structure of economic interest is that of the Chinese. The early growth of family-owned Chinese enterprise in the West was due to multi-generational family economic groups that pooled resources and lent for expansion. Might be interesting to look at this more in depth.

I do have some understanding of the multi-generational family farm/ranch. My daughter may marry into one. Right now it stands at three generations. The old papa in a tyrant. Then the two sons. The third generation is now coming out of college and beginning to marry. Between the two families this totals two daughters and three sons who all want to live on the ranch. As a family economic unit, they have had to plan for expansion. In other families, I have seen specialization and division of labor. One is in charge of mechanical equipment; one in charge of irrigation and hay; one in charge of livestock. Family disputes are common.

It would seem that blood, religion or some strong shared interest is required to bond and bind people sufficiently to become a successful sub-community.

-- marsh (armstrng@sisqtel.net), October 08, 1999.